Life to those shadows 9780520071445, 9780520071438

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Life to those Shadows

Life to those Shadows Noel Burch translated and edited by Ben Brewster |

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles ,

First published 1990 by the University of California Press Copyright © Noél Burch 1990 Translation © Woodstock Books 1990 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-50406 ISBN 0-520-07143-3 (cl.) ISBN 0-520-07144-1 (pbk.)

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Contents

Introduction | oo l

Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein _ | 6

Life to Those Shadows | | 23

The Wrong Side of the Tracks 43. Those Gentlemen of the Lantern |

and the Parade | | 80 Business is Business: An Invisible Audience 109

Passions and Chases—A Certain Linearisation — 143

Building a Haptic Space _ | 162

A Primitive Mode of Representation? 186 ,

The Motionless Voyage: Constitution of |

the Ubiquitous Subject | a 202

Beyond the Peephole, the Logos | 234

Conclusion — 267 Bibliography | 274 Filmography 284 Narrative, Diegesis: Thresholds, Limits 243

Index 306

BLANK PAGE

Introduction

This book was written for the most part between 1976 and 1981. It grew out of debates which, by at least 1965 in France and Italy and from around 1970 in Britain and the USA, had transformed the agenda of the history, esthetics and sociology of the cinema.

The remarkable results then achieved in two continents were made under the egis of structuralism, dialectical and historical materialism, and, in Britain and the USA, left-wing feminism, and in consequence the advances made in this period have suffered a certain eclipse in the current ‘post-modernist’ reaction. In the present period of triumphant empiricism, anything suggest-

ing, however weakly, systematisation or theorisation seems irredeemably ‘old hat’. Similarly, anything amounting to a basic opposition to the values secreted by capitalism seems simply ridiculous.

Unfortunately all minds do not move at the same speed. I suffer from this affliction. I am a laggard, one who always catches

the later train. At a time when everyone around me—including _ even my own students—was working on the first consistent materialist critique of the cinema comparable with Brecht’s of traditional theatre, when attempts were being made to dismantle the underlying mechanisms of the cinema as the Russian and Czech ‘Formalists’ had dismantled those of the novel, when, for the first time since Vertov and Eisenstein, there were efforts to

| recreate a cinema which would be both committed and innova- _ tory in its language—at this time, the author of these lines still propounded a ‘musicalist’ formalism close to the art-for-art’s-sake

positions of the turn of the century.! And I have to admit that, | despite attempts at the time to bring myself up to date—vis-a-vis Japanese cinema: see Burch (1979)—this book was originally con-

ceived more as a rejoinder to a very classical cinephile and prestructuralist historiography of the cinema than as an advance along the line laid down in works by writers such as Christian

, INTRODUCTION I

Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry with which I was only just becom-

ing familiar. |

But I should point out that the book was also conceived in the

penumbra of a broad aspiration shared at the time by certain film-maker theorists (the most prestigious of whom were Godard | and Straub), an aspiration to practices breaking with current stan-

dards, pointers as it were towards the political practices of the future Revolution. I[t is this aspiration, which, as the film-maker I

am, I then shared, that explains why this book was intended above all as a critique of theoretical and historical discourses tending to naturalise the ‘Hollywood’ system of representation whose primary function seemed to have been to misinform and anzsthetise the masses of the people. Thus the first aim of this book was to lay down historical bases for contestatory practices.

To this end I turned to the cinema of the earliest years, the primitive cinema.* The point was to show that the ‘language’ of __

the cinema is in no way natural, a fortiori that it is not eternal, that it has a history and is a product of History. To do this it was necessary to go back to a period in which this ‘language’ did not yet really exist, in which, in particular, there was not as yet that institution of the cinema within which we all, spectators and film-makers, live, and ‘which works to fill cinemas, not to empty

them’ (Metz 1982, p.7). But it was this Institution I wished to interrogate, or more precisely its characteristic mode of represen-

tation. For, and this is the main thesis of this book, I see the 1895-1929 period as one of the constitution of an Institutional Mode of Representation (hereinafter IMR) which, for fifty years,

has been explicitly taught in film schools as the Language of Cinema, and which, whoever we are, we all internalise at an early

age as a reading competence thanks to an exposure to films (in cinemas or on television) which is universal among the young in industrialised societies.

In addition, if this undertaking is still morally and socially justifiable, it finds that justification in the observation that millions of men and women who are taught to read and to write ‘their letters’, will never learn to do anything but read images and sounds, and can therefore only ever receive the discourse of images and sounds as ‘natural’. It is to the denaturalisation of this experience that I wish to contribute here. 2 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

My insistence on substituting for the term ‘language’ that of ‘mode of representation’ does not derive from any belief that the set of symbolic systems at work in the cinema of the Institution is

not, in the last analysis, ‘semiotic’ in nature. It is just that the object of the present essay is not that set of systems as a whole but rather the underlying conditions that make it possible, somewhat as monocular perspective makes possible the very complex iconographic codes of this or that school of Renaissance painting (though this parallel is very loose!). Furthermore, I am concerned to emphasise that, however universal, however fundamental this

mode of representation, it is no more neutral than it is ahistorical—whereas the ‘natural languages’ are still, despite Bakhtin, conceived of as neutral—that it produces meanings in and of itself, and that the meanings it produces are not unrelated to the place and time in which it developed: the capitalist and imperialist West in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Basically I have come to the same positions as the analyses once produced around the journals Cinethique and Tel Quel which already denounced as a ruse the innocence tacitly conceded this notorious ‘language’, just as Vertov had done, in a more narrowly polemical way. But at the same time, I reject a certain left-

ist theology and the technological determinism that traces the ‘original sin’ of the cinema to the camera and its one-eyed gaze. Of course, I also reject that other, idealist theology which sees the

original sin in the ‘theatricality’ of the beginnings and the progress of the ‘language’ as a series of ‘technical’ advances. Lastly, I refuse to see the system whose genealogy I wish to explore here,

and a fortiori its products, the films, as bad objects. For it is clear that many films with no ambitions to ‘deconstruct’ the codes of institutional narrativity, let alone the foundations of the

IMR, are nonetheless the bearers of a host of meanings other than those repeated over and over again by the IMR as such. A fortiori I cannot accept the modernist vision of the Institution as a bad object alienating our senses in some way, any more than I can accept the modernist fantasy of the primitive cinema as a kind of Prelapsarian Lost Paradise, the Fall being the result of

that other bad object, ‘narrativity’ (others would say ‘the language’), brought by Porter and Griffith as one brings the plague. By which I do not mean that the primitive cinema lacks INTRODUCTION 3

masterpieces (I shall discuss some of them), but that it is absurd to overvalue them in comparison with those that have emerged —s_—|

from the Institution or its margins. | -

At any rate, my central concern now is the nature of the

cinematic experience most widespread ‘amongst us’ (in the coun- > tries of the ‘centre’), the cinematic experience that I partake of

when I go to the pictures, au cinoche, to the movies, the. cinematic experience that I share with millions of men and, to a_ certain extent, with millions of women, too. From now on I shall ,

refer to exceptional works as, precisely, exceptional. : | Certain chapters of this book have appeared in English and

French magazines,? in versions often deviating from the texts presented here in crucial respects. The reason is that the present | work evolved over a period of more than six years, and contains

considerable changes in viewpoint from those of its earliest

sketches—a process of revision I believe to be endless. - | Finally, I wish to thank: Jorge Dana, who played an essential role in my earliest reflection on these matters and without whom |

this book would never have been undertaken; Ben Brewster, whose expert scholarship and scrupulous attention to detail spared me much embarrassment; Tom Gunning, who corrected a

number of factual errors; and Michel Chion, whose re-working of the original French text brought to light a number of further errors and loose formulations.

NOTES 1 Iam not surprised that Theory of Film Practice (Burch 1973) was very successful in the USA in a period of formalist modernism. That the intellectual climate in France should have evolved to the point that there was a demand for a reprint is all the more suggestive. 2 Iam concerned to justify persisting in the use of this term, discredited in other disciplines because of its ethnocentric implications. This cinema really is prim-

itive, in the sense that it is ‘first’ and ‘original’, but also in the sense that it is ‘rough’ and ‘crude’ in respect to all the norms that we have all (in all classes)

come to accept in the industrialised countries. ,

4 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS ,

3 The first chapter approximates Burch (1981a), i.e., ‘Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein’, Afterimage nos.8-9, Spring 1981, pp.4-21; the sixth

Burch (1983), i.e., ‘Passion, poursuite: la linearisation’, Communications no.38, 1983, pp.30-50; the eleventh Burch (1982), i.e., ‘Narrative/Diegesis: Thresholds, Limits’, Screen v 23 n 2, July-August 1982, pp.16-33. The third, fourth and fifth were the subject of a presentation at a seminar on primitive cinema

held at Dartington in September 1980.

, INTRODUCTION 5

Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein

During the nineteenth century, in a series of fairly distinct and generally spectacular stages, the way was cleared for a major aspiration, for what can perhaps be seen as the carrier wave of

the bourgeois ideology of representation. From Daguerre’s Diorama to Edison’s project of a Kinetophonograph, each of the

technologies that positivist historiography sees as a series of advances converging on the Cinema, was intended by its technicians and perceived by its publicists as one more step towards the Recreation of Reality, towards the realisation of a perfect ulusion of the perceptual world.

The reconstruction ‘as if you were there’ of famous natural disasters or architectural monuments in the Diorama (just like the

art of Madame Tussaud, contemporaneous with it) is an (ideo)logical extension of the trompe I’@il scene painting at which Daguerre excelled, as was the invention of photography, to which his name, along with that of Niepce, remains attached. After this, each new achievement was perceived by the ruling ideology in the

area as supplying a deficiency. thus, the presentation at the Lon-

don Exhibition of 1851 of the Stereoscope, an apparatus for which there was immediately an extraordinary craze (250,000 sold in three months) was greeted in the following terms by a contemporary: ‘... photography, reinvigorated, perfected and crowned by the stereoscope, is so superior to its former self that the day will

soon be here when all photographic pictures ... will come ... in

pairs to reproduce in all their truth, in all its gentle or harsh beauty, immaterial and living nature’ (Moigno 1852, pp.9-10; cit.

Deslandes 1966, p.67). And Baudelaire, sworn enemy of the naturalistic ideology of representation, railed against ‘these thousands of greedy eyes bent over the holes of the stereoscopes as if over peepholes to the infinite’ (1965, p.153). Let me anticipate the results of my investigations and reflections: I believe it was this aspiration to three-dimensionality that was satisfied by 6 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

the blossoming of the Institutional Mode of Representation from around 1910, and that the latter continues to satisfy it more than all the ephemeral re-appearances of red-and-green or polarising spectacles, raster screens, etc.

That other ‘lineage’ constituted by the succession of graphic animation devices, from Plateau’s Phenakistiscope to Reynaud’s Praxinoscope, had a similar reception, as, a fortiori, did all the attempts to link together, however imperfectly, these various stra-

tegies for the reconstitution of reality: “The stereoscope gives the | sensation of three-dimensionality to objects, the Phenakistiscope — that of movement. The Stereofantascope or Bioscope, as its name

implies, gives at one and the same time the sensations of threedimensionality and of movement, or the sensation of life.’!

And of course, Edison’s wish to link to his phonograph an

apparatus capable of recording and reproducing pictures, © fulfilling a dream of ‘grand opera being given at the Metropolitan

Opera House at New York ... with artists and musicians long since dead’ (Edison 1895), is not just the ambition of an astute captain of industry; it is also the pursuit of the fantasy of a class become the fantasy of a culture: to extend the ‘conquest of nature’ by triumphing over death through an ersatz of Life

itself. |

Later I shall examine some of the ways this genuine collective

drive was delayed and sidetracked in the first decade of the cinema, before the constitution of the Institutional Mode of Representation whose genealogy it is my intention to trace. We

shall see how that constitution occurred under the egis of the | reproduction in the field of the cinema of the theatrical, pictorial and literary modes of representation that had been prized by the bourgeoisies of Europe and the Americas for more than a century in 1915. And we will see how the series of advances towards the system of representation reigning by and large over the cinema

today arrived to fill deficiencies that are in the last analysis analogous with those the bourgeois ideology of representation felt when confronted with the Daguerrotype or the Phenakistiscope.

But we shall also see that for a decade this ideology found it hard to master the cinema, and that, thanks to this ‘failing’ and the contradictions it gave rise to, something else developed, which

I shall have to try to define when the time comes. For the BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 7

moment, however, there is another factor to be examined, one | which contributed directly to the invention of moving photographic pictures, but also helped to cause the important ‘detour’ made in an otherwise ineluctable historical movement; I must go back and examine the relations between scientific and technological research on the one hand, and what, following C.W. Ceram

(1965), is usually called the ‘archeology of the cinema’ on the other.

ie 2k Ae ke 2c oe oe ofc Kk of

Photography was invented just as painting, with Turner in particular, was ‘changing spaces’, as, in Francastel’s words, it ceased to

give the patron ‘a view of a piece of land to dominate’ (1977, p.170). This ‘proprietary’ dimension of the representation of space emerging in the quattrocento is unquestionably taken over by photography throughout the second half of the ‘bourgeois century’ in the portraits, still lives and genre pictures denounced

by Baudelaire (1965, p.153), even if, as Francastel also emphasised, photography helped, through its impact on innovatory artists, in the gradual destruction of the system of representation inherited from the Renaissance. But it is impossible to reduce the diachrony of this system, so

, tightly bound up with the rise of bourgeois power, to a mere symbolic and ideological instrumentalism. Panofsky (1953, pp.86-7) has demonstrated in Leonardo’s anatomical experimen_ tation the dialectical links beginning to be forged between artistic

and scientific practices in Renaissance Italy, and, in the same study, suggested other such links in the centuries that followed:

Anatomy as a science (and what applies to it applies to all the other ‘descriptive’ disciplines) was simply not possible without a method of preserving observations in graphic records complete and accurate in three dimensions. For, in the absence of such records, even the best observation was lost because it was

not possible to check it against others and thus to test its correctness and, no less important, its general validity. It is no 8 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

exaggeration to say that in the history of modern science the invention of perspective, coupled with the nearly simultaneous emergence of the multiplying arts, marks the beginning of a first period; the invention of the telescope and the microscope that of a second; and the invention of photography that of a third. In the descriptive sciences illustration is not so much the elucidation of a statement as the statement itself.

Indeed, if the researches that culminated in the invention of photography corresponded in immediate awareness to an ideological drive, it is just as clear that this new technology objectively answered a need of the descriptive sciences of the period (botany,

zoology, paleontology, astronomy, physiology). At the same : time, it should not be forgotten that the economic expansion and accession to political power of the bourgeoisie were closely linked to advances in the sciences and in technology, and that hence by evoking the strictly scientific effects of some instrument or mode of representation we are by no means leaving the historical ter-

rain of the relations of production. Here, therefore, no more than anywhere else, can one set scientific practices apart from

_ ideological ones without the utmost care. |

Turning for a moment to another current contributing to the prehistory of the cinema, 1.e., the search for a pictorial but nonphotographic illusion of movement, beginning with optical illusions like the Thaumatrope and culminating in a kind of deadend with Reynaud’s Praxinoscope, here too we can see a dialecti-

cal relationship between science and ideology. |

The English scientists studying the persistence of vision who, around 1825, discovered the principle of the Thaumatrope—a disc the rapid rotation of which perceptually superimposed two

images, one drawn on each of its sides—do not seem to have tried to locate their discovery in the movement towards naturalistic representation. For them it was nothing but an illusion and its designation. as such was inseparable from the desired effect. In fact, the applications they suggested for it seem to have been pri-

marily pedagogic, either directly, to teach about the phenomenon 7 of persistence of vision, or symbolically, as a memory aid in | teaching other things.?

The crucial studies of the great researcher Plateau, also BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 9

concerned with the persistence of vision (to the extent of losing __ his sight in attempts to gaze at the sun) suffered a similar down- > grading. But in parallel with the process that made his Phenakis- _ tiscope an enormously fashionable toy, the latter did, unlike the Thaumatrope—and this suggests the existence of a_ historical | threshold—come to find a place in the Frankensteinian ideology. The Austrian scientist Stampfer (1833, p.11; cit. Deslandes 1966,

p.37), simultaneously perfecting a disc like the Phenakistiscope | but without knowledge of Plateau’s work, praised it in the following terms: ‘It is clear that in this way it is possible to represent not only the different movements of a human being or —

animal, but also machines in motion or even longer lasting

actions, theatrical scenes or pictures from life.’ | , Alongside a claim that prefigures the representational vocation | of the cinema institution, this formulation contains an allusion to , potential technical and scientific applications. But on the one

hand, only an analytic description of animal or human move- | ment (or that of machines) could be of interest to the science of _ the period, for which mere representation was redundant—as we shall see with Janssen, Marey and Londe—and on the other, the Phenakistiscope and its successors (the Zoetrope and the Praxinoscope) constituted a regression on the level of graphic representation (they essentially adopted the flat-tint engraving techniques of

the Images d’Epinal or the caricatures in the illustrated press). : That is why such inventions were abandoned to the children of the bourgeoisie as ‘educational toys’ (we shall see later the impor- |

tance to be attached to the privileged connections between these => children and certain modes of representation which, right through © the nineteenth century, continued to deviate in these essential respects from those that engaged the serious attention of their parents).

Despite all the Stereofantascopes, Phasmatropes and Omniscopes whose ingenious inventors sought, like the alchemists of _ the middle ages, the Great Secret of the Representation of Life (notice the appeal to the very significant term Bioscope), the first |

technologically decisive steps were taken under more modest | auspices. On the one hand there was a rather curious team formed by a Californian millionaire governer and race-horse

breeder, and an English photographer fascinated by the |

10 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

photographic freezing of movement, who first joined forces to perfect training methods for a pedigree trotter—on the other a top French scientist who also had no interest in the representa| tion of the movement of life but only in its analysis. I believe this detour via scientific and technical practices in which photography _

ceased to be a substitute for academic painting and became, as Baudelaire wished, ‘the servant of the sciences’ (1965, p.154), was

to have a certain impact on the early cinema. | It is true that Muybridge’s status seems somewhat ambiguous today, that there was much of the showman about him. But the use he made of his Zoogyroscope—derived from the Phenakistiscope and later rechristened the Zoopraxinoscope—to animate shots of a galloping horse at the end of the lectures he organised

(notably in Parisian salons in 1881) was simply to ‘prove the excellence of the method for the analysis of movement that he had perfected: the analysis was accurate because from it he was able to achieve a synthesis and reconstitute the real appearance of the subjects he was studying’ (Deslandes 1966, p.101). For the first pictures obtained by Muybridge were not believed. That is perhaps one of the most symptomatic features of his experiment. Even Meissonier, the great equine painter, steeped in the codes of representation of academic painting thanks to which the West as

_a whole was persuaded of the phenomenal identity of a certain | idealisation of the movement of the horse and Reality, refused for a time, we are told (Foster-Hahn 1973, p.91), to believe in the

authenticity of the documents Muybridge had published. This was perhaps the first time that ‘photography—the possibility of mechanically recording a picture in conditions more or less analogous to those of vision—revealed not the real character of traditional vision but, on the contrary, its systematic character’ (Fran-

castel 1977, p.44). Need I add that all those—and there seem to

have been many of them in Paris—who found these pictures unrealistic also found them ugly. This sentiment was shared by Marey himself, moreover, who later made the following remark about Muybridge’s pictures: ‘Is it not that the ugly is only the unknown, and that the truth seen for the first time offends the ~ eye?’ (Marey 1895, p.183).4 This first break between photography

and the codes of representation of the ‘naturalistic’ painting of the nineteenth century made by Muybridge seems to me to be

| BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 11

absolutely crucial, for, from a certain point of view, all the work of the “Great Pioneers of the Cinema’ was to consist of restoring to moving photography the ‘beauty—that of bourgeois painting, but also of bourgeois theatre and the novel—which Muybridge’s

innocent procedure had robbed it of. In a certain sense, of course, the act of passing these snapshots one after another to prove their veracity already resulted for the first spectators in

London and Paris in their reintegration into the domain of Beauty. But if we are here closer than is generally realised to Lumieére’s founding procedure, we are also at the antipodes of the

IMR. And it can even be said that a true history of the gestation

of the latter must trace the itinerary from this flat, remote silhouette of a trotting horse, however ‘real’ its movement, to the carefully modelled shot of Al Jolson tossing off his famous sentence ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’

Technologically speaking, Marey’s efforts, deriving like Muybridge’s from the Phenakistiscope (via Janssen’s Photo- | graphic Revolver), lie in the direct line of the great Frankensteinian dream of the nineteenth century: the recreation of life, the symbolic triumph over death. But the man and his works were in some sense innoculated against the virus of representation by the ideology then suffusing his discipline. For Marey, and the physiology of his period, animals, and hence men, are machines: ‘Living beings have been frequently and in every age compared to

machines, but it is only in the present day that the bearing and the justice of the comparison are fully comprehensible’ (1874, p.1). A vulgar and mechanistic materialism whose utility to the ruling classes in the era of wild capitalism is clear—Sadoul (1973,

t.I, p.76) underlines the fact that the investigations into the graphic inscription of movement undertaken at the beginning of

his career by the future inventor of the Chronophotographe> enabled him to find a ‘way to subordinate man more closely to the machine, since his odographe is nothing but the first “spy in the cab”, familiar to railwaymen and lorry drivers.’® It might be

added that the other aspect of his earliest endeavours—the graphic analysis of animal and human movements—opened the way to Taylorism.

It was their mechanistic materialism that made Marey and Londe (at any rate until the international enthusiasm for the

12 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS |

Kinetoscope) ferocious opponents of the synthesis of movement. In 1899, Marey could still write about moving photographs: ‘But after all, what they show, our eyes could have seen directly. They

have added nothing to the power of our vision, subtracted nothing from our illusions. But the true character of a scientific method is to supply the inadequacies of our senses or to correct

their errors. To do so chronophotography must therefore renounce the representation of the phenomena such as we see them.’ And he concluded that ‘only slow and fast motion are of any interest for scientific synthesis’ (Marey 1899; cit. Sadoul 1973,

t.I, p.100). Albert Londe, a photographer and, in 1891, the inven- | tor of a twelve-lens camera designed for medical research, shared the same strict viewpoint: ‘Leaving aside the curiosity aspect that enables us to reproduce various scenes, there is no doubt that seeing these series leaves us in exactly the same position as we are before the model itself (1896, p.726; cit. Sadoul 1973, t.I, p.100). It is gratifying, but also instructive, to compare such declarations with those of Dziga Vertov—‘we cannot improve the making of

our own eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera’ (1984, | p.15)—or Jean Epstein—‘a documentary shot describing in a few minutes twelve months in the life of a plant ... seems to free us of terrestrial, i.e., solar time, of the rhythm to which we seemed ineluctably bound’ (1946, pp.49-50). But the comparison is only meaningful in the context of an analysis of the objectively real but highly complex links between a whole ‘anti-illusionist’ aspect

of the cinema before Griffith and the global critique made by Vertov, Epstein, Dulac and others of the cinema usually said to

have begun with Griffith. | Moreover, Marey, with his customary obstinacy in research,

following his photographic rifle and before his film Chronophotographe—correctly regarded as the first moving picture camera—made a third invention running directly counter to linear, analogical representation. This was the plate Chronophotographe, which produced the first stroboscopic photographs, synchronic decompositions of movement on the surface of a sin- | gle picture. This is perhaps the clearest material trace among all those that locate Marey outside the Frankensteinian tendency. Let me also cite the following blind spot, in the same sense: the system of arresting the film by friction he insisted on retaining BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 13

and which precisely prevented him from obtaining from his second Chronophotographe projections able to produce the illusion of continuity, because the images jumped about so much: Marey, as he himself said, did not care. It is true that in 1892-3, spurred on nonetheless, it seems, by the successes of Edison, he did try to perfect a machine ‘to project the synthesis of movement in an effective way’ (Marey 1898,

p.24). But having run into difficulties in transforming an ~ apparatus which was poorly adapted in principle to the task, he quickly abandoned this experiment in an undertaking he regarded as secondary.

of eo fe ok ie 3 i 2 / So far, my reading of the history of the cinema ts not basically in contradiction with the classic perspective. I have simply been concerned to bring out certain features I believe will make what follows clearer. However, my claim that Lumiére’s works—and at

any rate the characteristic picture they gave rise to—reflect an attitude closer to that of Marey than to that of Daguerre may seem more surprising. For the Cinématographe Lumiére was universally perceived as the culmination of the long quest for the

‘absolute’, for the secret of the duplication of life, a few milestones in which I have just singled out. But to hold such a view is

to ignore precisely the fact that the efforts of Janssen, Marey,

Muybridge and Londe are evidence of an_ ideological configuration quite different from the one inspiring the achievements of the Daguerres, Dubosqs and company: it is to ignore the detour through applied science of which the achievements of Lumiere and his cameramen are simply, in the last analysis, a

continuation: it is also to neglect the essential features distinguishing the early films of W.K.L. Dickson—closer to the

Frankensteinian tradition, and to be discussed in the next

chapter—from most of the films shot by Lumiére and the cameramen he trained. Only after several months of trial and error did Louis Lumiére,

supported by the apparatus of research and manufacture 14 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

provided by the firm producing sensitive plates and films that he

and his brother Auguste had made the most important in | Europe, succeed where so many other more isolated and less | well-endowed investigators had failed. The first subject to be shot

on celluloid film by the new camera in 1895 was Sortie d’usine (‘Employees Leaving the Lumiére Factory’—the first version, not included in the Lumiére catalogue). Its mode of shooting, a mode

clearly inscribed in the image itself and needing no resort to intentionalism for its reading, seems very significant to me in rela-

tion to the contribution Louis Lumiére was to make as a film-

maker to the cinema of the first ten years. | | This first subject consists, like all the earliest films, of a single

view (shot). It shows the workers, men and women, of the ‘Lumiére plant leaving work, and also the exit of the carriage of the owners. “The camera was set up in a room on the ground

floor of a building,’ explains Francois Doublier, an assistant of | the Lumiéres, so that the ‘subjects’ would not be ‘distracted by

the sight of the camera’ (cit. Pinel 1974, p.415). The framing chosen is such that the figures occupy about half the height of the screen when they move towards the frame edge to leave the field of vision. Although a wall occupies half the picture, the sense of space and depth which was to strike all the early spectators of Lumiére’s films is already present in the contrast between this wall blocking the background to the left and the movement

of the crowd emerging from the dark interior on the right, its perspective emphasised by a framing which brings out what seem

to be the supports of the roof. Once the workers had begun to leave the camera was started, and cranking continued until there was no more film in the camera, i.e., for about a minute (55 feet

at about 16 frames per second). : Thus, as well as this being a decisive experiment made with the | prototype of this historical camera, it also represents an experiment in the observation of reality; as we would put it today, it was a matter of ‘catching’ an action, known in its overall lines beforehand, predictable within a few minutes, but random in all its details, which randomness was deliberately respected by con-

cealing the camera. |

It is all these characteristics, adopted in a large number of the |

films of the ‘Lumiére school’, linked to the ‘slice-of-life’ content BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 15

of so many of their views, that have led to Lumiére acquiring the | reputation of having been the ‘first documentarist’, the first _ champion of a ‘direct’ or ‘actuality’ cinema. And this is a per- |

fectly justifiable standpoint. Oo But I should like to examine these same characteristics (and _ also some others) in the light not of conceptions and practices which often grew up much later, but in the perspective of that

short period of the primitive cinema. -

Thus, this subject’s characteristics are a certain breadth of the field of vision and a certain height of the ‘actors’ in the frame, —s_—| thanks to the distance between the camera and the people filmed —T and the focal length of the lens used, and also a rigorous frontality. Now, as we shall see, these features reappeared constantly in the years to come, they mark almost all films between 1900 and 1905, and then eventually came to be felt by the most self-aware

pioneers of the IMR to be obstacles to be overcome. | But what is the source of the choices that presided over the shooting style found in this film as in so many others? First, —

undoubtedly, practices then dominant in still photography. Georges Sadoul (1964, p.51) has emphasised how much Repas de bebe (‘Baby’s Dinner’) and many other scenes of Lumiére family

life preserved on film by Louis Lumiére resemble the photographs |

of his own family he found in an attic. And it should not be forgotten that Louis Lumiere, co-director of a firm which had prac-—

tically created the amateur photography market in Europe by the | release of his first invention, the famous ‘Etiquette Bleue’ plates, —_—

was himself a very experienced ‘amateur’ photographer. But here,

and even more in the innumerable street scenes that were to predominate in the successive catalogues of the company, we are dealing with a mode of photographic representation popularised

by the picture postcard. This is the ‘urban landscape’ made possi- | ble, like the experiments of Marey and Muybridge, only by the appearance on the market of high-speed emulsions (as opposed to rural landscapes, of course, which were already accessible to the

collodion wet plate process, whose limitations also helped pro- __ duce the frozen portraits and genre pictures of the ‘first generation’ of photographers). What transformations was this mode of —| photographic representation to undergo as a result of its contact with the Cinématographe, and, more generally, when it came to ©

16 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

be inscribed in the first filmic practices? The moving urban landscape was to be characterised by a maximalisation of the ‘polycentrism’ of a picture already free of the centripetal rules of academic painting.’ In other words, neither the street scenes nor the other general views that succeeded them spontaneously offer the reader’s guide that would allow their complex content to be grasped and enumerated, especially at a single viewing. For, once

the ‘subject? has been designated—by its title in the Lumiére - catalogue—what is the content of a film like Sortie d’usine, like Arrivee d’un train a La Ciotat (‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat’),

or like Place des Cordeliers (Lyon)? Only an exhaustive listing of i all that can be seen in the picture (which is what the first newspa-

per accounts tried to provide) can give an answer to this question, which could easily give rise for each of the Lumiere films to

a text at least as prolix as Raymond Roussel’s La Vue. But it | was a standard practice at the earliest projections (and especially at those provided at the four corners of the earth by the Lumiére cameramen) to run the films several times in succession, and one should not, I think, reduce this practice to the mere desire of the

new audiences for a repeat of the ‘shock’; these images carry — | inscribed in them the need to be seen and reseen, it is inconceiv- | able that an audience of the period, any more than one of today, could have reckoned that they had seen them definitively after — seeing them once, in the way that today we can say we have seen

the film on last week at our local cinema which we will not go to | see again precisely because we have seen it (and consumed it). Here we are touching on one of the basic contradictions between the primitive cinema and the IMR, one to which I shall return. | But it would be narrow and reductive to treat the ‘Lumiére picture’ as a mere avatar of the postcard. Not only did it become the model for thousands of ‘documentary’ films in the first ten years of the cinema, but certain of its features are also found in one whole aspect of French narrative film-making from Zecca and Alice Guy to Perret and Feuillade. Taking into account certain subjective factors (the ideology, education and all the activities of Louis Lumiére and his brother Auguste) as well as the objective factors described above, the pro-

duction and influence of this model picture can be linked with the | ‘scientistic’ tendency manifested by Muybridge, Marey, etc., a

: BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 17

tendency which seems to have made all these great researchers of | the end of the archezological period immune to the seductive dream of total representation, probably because that dream is, precisely, a spiritualist one. But the Lumiére brothers saw themselves throughout their lives

as researchers, as scientists. Their researches were, of course,

applied ones. Auguste devoted most of his life to medical research. As for Louis, I agree completely with Vincent Pinel’s estimate that his real life’s work was the colour photography process called Autochromie, on which he began work in 1891 but

which he did not perfect until 1907. Moreover I regard it as highly revealing as to the attitude he took to his work, an attitude diametrically opposed to that of an Edison or a Demeny, that the first presentation of the Cinématographe outside the laboratory was given as an addendum to a lecture devoted in the

main to the projection of colour transparencies: |

Louis Lumiére had come to give a lecture on the Photographic Industry, on the Company of which he was a director, and on the attempts to industrialise the Lippmann colour photography process to which a large part of his research work was devoted at the time. However, at the end of the lecture there followed an impromptu presentation of a ‘projection Kinetoscope’ as the proceedings describe it. The three Lumieres, all present at the projection, were more surprised than anyone by the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the projection of a single film: Sortie d@usine. The success obtained by this short subject was, to their astonishment, greater than that of the fixed colour pro-

jections (Pinel 1974, p.411). | |

Moreover, a few weeks later, Louis again presented a film ‘as an encore’ to a colour demonstration, and once again was surprised by the reactions. But it 1s above all Lumiére’s attitude to his subjects, the framing that generally allows ample space for the development of the action in all directions, that reveals a quasi-scientific attitude. The

scene in fact seems to unfold before his camera rather like the behaviour of a micro-organism under the biologist’s microscope

or the movement of the stars at the end of the astronomer’s 18 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

telescope. Nor is it without interest that that first film, Sortie

d’usine, was re-filmed five months later to test a_ technical , improvement, in exactly the same conditions as the first time. Of

course it was a shot within arm’s reach, as it were, but the fact that it was reproduced as precisely as possible seems to me to

confirm my thesis about Louis’s attitude to his work. | Of course, all the films conforming to this type were not shot with a concealed camera. In Arrivée des congressistes a Neuville- | sur-Sadne (‘Disembarcation of Photography Congress Delegates at Neuville-sur-Sadne’), the conferencees unselfconsciously take their hats off to the camera, and, looking at the various versions of Arrivee d’un train a La Ciotat, it seems possible that Lumiére asked his wife to take a different path for each ‘take’. But these films and all the other ‘documentary tableaux’ that share in the

constitution of the Lumiére model seem to me to derive in the | end from the same procedure: to choose a framing as likely as possible to ‘catch’ a moment of reality, then to film it without any attempt to control it or to centre the action.® In this respect,

moreover, I can only formally deny the thesis proposed by Georges Sadoul and other historians following him, that with Arrivee d’un train a La Ciotat Louis Lumiére prefigured classical editing. This thesis, based on an analysis of frame stills—always a

dangerous procedure if films are to be treated as a soctophenomenal reality, which implies the end-result of cinematic projection—is of a piece with the overall approach of linear historiography, which attaches great importance to ‘first times’. In fact, the result is to conceal the specificity of a procedure in which chance plays so large a part that it could not but produce such a succession of ‘shot scales’, but for which the way such suc- | cessions demand to be read had nothing to do with what was to form the basis for the ‘editing codes’ (the stills so conveniently

stationary in a book go by very quickly during projection). | Towards the end of his life, Louis Lumiére confided in Georges

Sadoul: ‘My endeavours were endeavours of technological research. I never did what they call “direction” (mise-en-scene). And I can’t see myself in a modern studio’ (Sadoul 1964, p.107). “In the cinema, the age of technicians is over, this is the age of

theatre.’ On another occasion,’ says Sadoul, ‘I used the word “direction” in talking about his films and he raised his eyebrows. - BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 19

film’ (ibid., p.100). , It was clear that he holds that direction is not appropriate in a

These declarations are, of course, perfectly compatible with the ideology and practice of ‘documentary’, which Lumiére has been

said to have initiated. Nevertheless I believe, as Vincent Pinel acutely suggests (1974, p.420), that one should speak rather of a practice and an ideology closer to those of amateur film-making (as it developed after the appearance on the market around 1900 of sub-standard-gauge cameras and films) than to those of, say, the GPO Film Unit. No doubt Lumiére did make a number of technological contributions to the promotion of the Frankensteinian dream, not only in his invention of the Cinématographe but also in an improvised attempt at “direct synchronisation’ (at the Lyon Photographic Congress), in the giant screen of the 1900

Exposition, and in a_ three-dimensional cinematic process presented at the Cannes Festival in 1935. But in all we know of him, throughout his life he never fell victim to the lyrical dream of analogical representation, the mythology of victory over death. |

He and his brother belonged by their education to the same rationalist tradition as Marey and Londe, and it was this tradition that so decisively overdetermined films that were to exert a real hegemony over production and consumption internationally for a number of years, helping to point the latter into a path that

was soon to seem a side track. The next chapter offers a very convincing proof of this in that strange phenomenon, ‘Hale’s Tours’, which demonstrates so clearly that Lumiére’s ‘hyperrealism’ was problematic.

Of course, the Cinematographe was nevertheless recruited at the outset and in the footsteps of the Diorama and the Stereoscope in the service of the Frankensteinian ideology, whatever may have been the private feelings of its inventor or the objective

characteristics of the figuration it established. A famous article

printed in Le Radical, one of the two minor papers that announced the historic premiére in the Salon Indien (the established press failed to note the occasion) is highly suggestive: ‘Whatever the scene thus taken, and however large the number of

individuals thus surprised in their everyday activities, you see them again natural size, in colour [sic], with perspective, distant skies, houses, with a perfect illusion of real life.... Speech has 20 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

already been collected and reproduced, now life is collected and reproduced. For example, it will be possible to see one’s loved ones active long after they have passed away’ (cit. Bessy & Lo Duca 1948, p.47). And it is noteworthy that the only other article on the matter that came out that December 30th 1895 (in La Poste) ends on the same mortuary note: ‘When these cameras are

made available to the public, when everyone can photograph their dear ones, no longer in a motionless form but in their movements, their activity, their familar gestures, with words on their lips, death will have ceased to be absolute’ (cit. ibid., pp. 47-8). Thus form, movement, colour (added because it goes with the others, even if this was to anticipate by a number of years),? all,

for these bourgeois journalists, come together to fulfill the

supreme fantasy: the suppression of death. !° NOTES

(1966), p.73. ,

1 Dubosgq, addition to patent no.13,609, November 12th 1852; cit. Deslandes

2 ‘Only in the sixteenth century did this modern pattern of death become the , norm. In the Counter Reformation and the funereal and obsessive games of the Baroque, but especially in Protestantism which, by individualising each conscience before God and decathecting collective ceremonies, hastened the

process of the individual fear of death. It too was to give rise to the mighty , modern undertaking to exorcise it: the ethic of accumulation and material production, the sanctification by investment, labour and profit usually called the “spirit of capitalism’? (Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic)—that machine of salvation from which intra-worldly ascesis has gradually withdrawn, giving way to worldly and productive accumulation without changing the purpose:

protection against death.... Death has become a “right-wing’’, individual and tragic notion, “reactionary” in regard to movements of revolt and social revo- — lution’ (Baudrillard 1976, pp. 273-4).

3 ‘It has occurred to me that this amusing toy might be made instrumental in impressing classical subjects upon the memory of young persons .... Why can

we not... thus represent the Metamorphoses of Ovid; or what say you ... to converting the fleet of Aineas into sea-nymphs ...?’ (Paris 1827, pp.11-12; cit. Deslandes 1966, p.29). This is the spirit in which the Thaumatrope became a fashionable toy, associations of this kind becoming the basis for ‘comic quatrains, puns and political allusions’ (Deslandes 1966, p.28).

BAUDELAIRE VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN 21 >

4 He went on as follows: “These positions, as revealed by Muybridge, at first appeared unnatural, and the painters who first dared to imitate them astonished rather than charmed the public.’ The painters in question were Meis- _

sonier and, of course, Degas. - oe

5 Muybridge’s inspiration in the realisation of his first camera system. oe 6 Marey was aware and proud of the possible applications of his work. In Movement (1895), he explains that his analyses will enable soldiers to carry heavier gear longer distances. 7 Certain very acentric urban landscapes painted by Manet or Degas may prob- |

ably be regarded as a kind of reaction from photography onto the most | advanced painting of the period. 8 lam not here referring to Repas de bebe (and the other Lumiére films deriving | from it) or Arroseur et arrose (properly Le Jardinier et le petit espiégle, ‘The , Gardener, the Bad Boy and the Hose’ or ‘Watering the Gardener’) and other

comic sketches. The latter, of course, open onto different horizons. 9 As we can see here—and will see again with Gorky (p.23 below)—colour has a place in the Frankensteinian dream. To this extent Lumiére contributed to that dream, following Ducos du Hauron and others, with his Autochromie process. However, non-photographic colour was to appear very quickly inthe —

cinema, without a decisive step being thereby taken towards institutional pres- a ence. In fact colour has never, even in our own day, provided more than an

extra reality in the IMR.

10 In a famous article (Bazin 1967), André Bazin traces this ‘mummy complex’ | back to the ancient Egyptians, regarding it as a kind of universal drive. As such it serves as a legitimation for his own attachment to bourgeois illusionism.

22 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 7

Life to Those Shadows aan |

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees,

the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous _ grey. Grey rays of sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey : faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is no life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.... And all this in a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is

heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a sin- | gle note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies

the movements of people. |

The commentator so appalled by the unnatural character of the _ Cinématographe Lumiére, discovered in a ‘dubious’ variety show in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896, is none other than that great apostle of literary naturalism, Maxim Gorky (1960, p.407). I think | this is a key quotation. It contains a clear and complete expression of the requirements of the naturalistic ideology of representation then dominant among almost all the members of the European intelligentsia, major and minor:! a mode of expression with any claims to realism had to be endowed with colour, sound and _ speech, three dimensions, spatial extension (‘All this moves, teems

with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes

somewhere beyond it’). | : | | So, if the scientistic tradition descending from Muybridge and

Marey and strong in Sortie d’usine and the subjects more or less directly deriving from it, together with forms of representation with a long history and still alive among the masses of the people, helped to direct the early cinema along paths which seem hardly compatible with naturalistic ‘presence’, the latter gradually

tended to impose itself on moving pictures nonetheless. The LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 23

conflict, lasting more than fifteen years, that stemmed from the objective resistance moving pictures put up, by reason of these circumstances of their birth, to this ‘hegemonic will’, was to produce in particular the labile, ambivalent character of a whole section of primitive cinema as compared with the monovalent stability of the IMR.

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It is no accident that one of the only films in that first Lumiére programme that found ‘grace’ in the eyes of the author of The Lower Depths—afflicted it 1s clear, with a quite neurotic attachment to naturalism—was Repas de bebe, probably the first film to catch faces ‘from life’ in and for themselves, on a scale allowing a close reading of those constantly evolving fields of signs. Gorky did not, of course, criticise Sortie d’usine for the anonymity of the workers in it; confronted there with a crowd of workers, with the masses, he tacitly conceded the legitimacy of this lack of priority

of the notion of the individual (as embodied in the close-up). Already here are two poles of a problematic that was to undergo interesting developments in the USSR (the strike sequence in Mat’—‘Mother’—for example). But it is clear that, in the absence of the Word, the remoteness of faces and bodies from the camera

and the acentric image it implies were felt by all those who shunned picture shows once the novelty effect had worn off to be

the crucial defect of the more characteristic films of this first period. This makes it all the more important to bring out everything in the early cinema that already reflects an ‘awareness’ of this defect and an attempt to redress it. For example, contrary to a highly tenacious myth, the medium close-up and even the true close-up are found in the very earliest stages of the cinema, in Europe and in the USA. They rapidly became an established presence in the first decade, so that it can be stated, with no wish to cultivate paradox, that the development of institutional editing among the Americans, the Danes, and so on, was to reduce the proportion of medium close-ups and close-ups in the cinema, and that for a number of years. 24 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

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LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 25

It is emblematic of the contradictions of the early cinema that | it was an assistant of Marey, the inveterate enemy of analogical representation, who first introduced the Frankensteinian complex into the cinema:

How many people would be happy if they could only see once again the features of someone now dead. The future will see

the replacement of motionless photographs, frozen in their frames, with animated portraits that can be brought to life at

the turn of a handle. Physiognomic expressions will be preserved as voices are by the phonograph. It will even be possible to combine the latter with the Phonoscope to complete the illusion.... We will do more than analyse, we will bring back to life (Demeny 1892, p.315; cit. Sadoul 1973, t.I, pp.169-70).

At the beginning of his career, the physiologist Georges Demeny added to the list of kinetic analyses produced by his patron Marey, extending it into the highly premonitory domain

of an analysis of speech. To do this he himself posed for the Chronophotographe—in close-up, of course—articulating sentences with a great cinematic future: ‘Je vous aime’ (I love you) and ‘Vive la France!’ (Long Live France!). However, deaf mutes asked to read the single frames so obtained found it extremely difficult to do so, facing, in fact, the same problem horse lovers had with Muybridge’s instantaneous pictures. Thus, it was in the name of scientific instrumentality (the idea was to enable deaf

mutes to learn to lip-read) that Demeny followed in the footsteps | of Muybridge and proceeded to transgress the ‘taboo’ pronounced by his patron against the synthesis of movement (there seems to be some connection between this transgression and the estrangement between the two men), perfecting his Phonoscope,

first in a peepshow form, then a projecting one. This projector was a device to reproduce views taken by the Chronophoto-

graphe, and it was a great success at an 1892 exhibition of pho- | tography in the Champ de Mars, where it ran continuously. This first inscription of the gestures of speech in moving pic-

tures was portentous in two respects. On the one hand it foreshadowed a whole art of mimed speech, coeval with the Institution 26 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

and a dimension of many of its masterpieces. On the other, how- | ever, it led directly to the first talking cinema, that of the period

before 1910. |

It is no accident that Demeny was one of the very first to give the cinema a soul: he had a real vocation for ideology. At first he

was so blinded by his fantasy of the living portrait—the Phonoscope was to become part of bourgeois domestic furnishings, like the photo album, it was to be a kind of altar on which the small —

shareholder could celebrate a Catholic version of the cult of — | ancestors—that he took no interest in the idea of a show for a : large audience, which perhaps seemed more vulgar to him, until a

meeting with Léon Gaumont. But the apparatus he proposed to Gaumont, in 1895, was the Phonophone, a combination of the

_ Phonograph and the projection Phonoscope, intended to work in | synchrony. And although in the first instance the Gaumont engineers worked on a cinematography-and-projection system deriving from the Phonoscope, it was this meeting between Gau-

mont and Demeny that was to result in the Gaumont Chrono- | phone in 1900, the system with which Alice Guy was to shoot more than 100 singing or talking subjects between 1900 and 1907

(see Guy 1976, pp.188-92). | |

As is well known, the very first attempt at a talking cinema can

be attributed to an initiative of the ‘father of the Phonograph’, Edison, himself. But unlike Demeny in this respect, the famous

inventor conceived the talking (or rather singing) cinema as a mass spectacle—and what a mass spectacle!—from the outset: ‘I

believe that in coming years by my work and that of Dickson, Muybridge, Marey and others ... grand opera can be given at the Metropolitan Opera House at New York without any material change from the original, and with artists and musicians long

since dead’ (Edison 1895). 7 , It now seems established beyond dispute that Thomas Alva Edison only played a marginal part in the invention of the

cinema (see Hendricks 1961). At most he can be regarded as the

source of a number of fruitful ideas, especially that of the perforated celluloid strip, which probably still has a considerable future. Nonetheless, the part played by the laboratory he ran at West Orange (in conjunction with his role as founder-mentor of a huge electrical trust) and for which worked his assistant W.K.L. | LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 27

Dickson, the ‘inventor’ of the Kinetoscope, justifies a considera- _

tion of Edison the man and his ideas as a portrait of the ‘powers’ presiding over the birth of the cinema in the USA. Moreover, _ the earliest endeavours at West Orange have a certain symptomatic homogeneity, which can be summed up precisely in Edison’s lyrico-theatrical dream. This vision embodies, in the _ guise of the mere calculation of an astute businessman, an exten- > sion of the Wagnerian fantasy, of the ideology of the Gesamtkunstwerk, according to which more than one artist via equivalent —_ forms (Skryabin, but also Kandinsky) thought to ‘aim simultane-.

ously for unity and multiplicity, to offer an equivalent to what nature does, to endow the work of art with a fourth, cosmic, __

dimension’ (Schneider 1963, p.63). oe Ce,

, This association of naturalism and a certain petty-bourgeois __ metaphysics is a perfect evocation of Edison’s character. In him = we can locate the point at which the bourgeois fantasy par excellence, so well expressed in Demeny’s living portraits, of the this- = _ worldly non-finitude of the subject, of the materialist victory over death, is, as it were, sublimated in that of total representation, in | which spectators overstep the narrow limits of their lives in a communion with ‘artists and musicians long since dead’, project-

ing themselves into the latter’s survival. ° | ee

For Edison, the project of moving photographs arose to supply a defect inherent in the phonograph. The simultaneous reproduc-

tion of the visible and the audible was the aim of all the experiments conducted under his egis by Dickson up to 1895, whena Kinetophonograph was made available to the public, only one —s_—©

year after the opening of the first Kinetoscope parlour in New aoe

~ York. However, this apparatus, which did not even aspire toa rigorous synchronisation, was never satisfactory, and only forty- _

five models were manufactured, whereas the Kinetoscope was | already spreading around the globe in thousands. This technological failure has been attributed to Edison’s lack of subsequent - Interest in the perfecting of an invention whose original paternity he nevertheless boasted: at any rate, there is no doubt that he — . always regarded the Kinetoscope as an experimental passing stage in a series of researches whose ultimate aim remained the repro-— :

duction of life, the projection in a vast auditorium of pictures and sounds capable of constituting an analogue of reality. 7 coe

28 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS — -

Despite all their technological failures and blind spots (the fetishisation of electricity that encumbered Dickson with an enor-

| mous camera, the inability to solve the problem of film travel in projection), the Edison-Dickson duo do have an essential place in

the establishment of the institutional vision. For, on the one hand, it was at West Orange that the first synchronised cinema was in fact realised, in 1913, and it was in the Edison studio that

the first systematic experiments in editing in the United States were made, by Edwin S. Porter. But, above all, it was Edison and

Dickson who built the first real studio, the Black Maria, a prefiguration of the soundproof stages of the 1930’s; it was in the Black Maria that The Kiss was filmed for the New York World in 1896, introducing the iconography of bourgeois theatre into mov-

ing pictures for the first time, and also inaugurating the erotic vocation of the close view;? it was they who, when filming at greater distance, felt the need for a black backdrop that would _ centre the pictures destined for the ‘peepholes’ of the Kinetoscopes,’ by contrast with the Lumiére model; finally, it was they _ who decided to christen the projector they obtained in a rather ‘unscrupulous way from its inventor Armat (see Sadoul 1973, t.I, pp.305-12) the Vitascope—‘vision of life-—in emblematic opposi- —

tion to the Cinématographe—‘writing in movement’—the name

chosen by Louis Lumiere. |

And there is a further striking confirmation of the place Edison occupied in the tableau raisonne of the early cinema, a place poles apart from that of Marey: almost exactly as the latter published the description of his Sphymographe, an instrument to record the. slightest quiver of the ‘animal mechanism’ in a scrupulous gra-

phism, Edison was perfecting an astonishing analogue of that

| animal mechanism known as Woman, a mechanical analogue |

had proposed). | :

~moved by phonographs (a brilliant inversion of the set-up Marey

- Of course, this prodigy only occurred in a famous novel, Vil-

~ liers de ’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future of 1880. But allow me to linger

over this fable, in which the great writer embroiders around the , already legendary figure of Edison a series of quasi-mystical variations on a reactionary ideology of the relations between the sexes, for it is of the greatest interest for an understanding of the

Institution to come. | , LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 29

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Fig. 2: It was no doubt as much his awareness of the difficulty of reading complex images through the peep-hole of the Kinetoscope as it was an urge to imitate the photographer's studio that led W.K.L. Dickson to shoot scenes like Barber Shop (1894) against a black backdrop.

30 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

All histories of the cinema do, indeed, allow space for this novel, regarded as prophetic insofar as in an aside in one chapter Villiers (in 1879 apparently) deduces from his hero’s most famous invention—the Phonograph—the invention that was to make him even more famous—the cinema.> But in these evocations of this curious book, it does not seem to have been noticed that its main content, a specifically phallocentric variant of the Frankenstein

complex, constitutes a marvellously apt metaphor for the ima-

ginary operations of the future Institution. |

When Edison, in order to prevent his former benefactor, the English dandy Lord Ewald, from committing suicide, succeeds in replacing his mistress Alicia, a woman of perfect beauty but with a ‘vile’ soul, with the andreide Hadaly, a woman who is artificial

but just as beautiful and who perfectly reflects man’s desire, Ewald is at first horrified. But eventually he gives in to the argu- , ments of the andreide, who has become the double of the other whose ‘spirit contradicts her body’. Hadaly whispers:

Who am I? A being of dreams ... who is half awake in your thoughts—and whose salutary shadow you can banish by one _ of those clear arguments which will leave you in my place only

emptiness and painful boredom, the fruit of their supposed correctness. Oh, do not wake from me, do not banish me, on a pretext that treacherous reason, only capable of destruction, is already whispering quietly in your ear.... Who am I, you ask.

My existence here below, for you at least, depends only on your free decision. Attribute existence to me, affirm to yourself that I exist, strengthen me from your own self, and suddenly I

shall be, in your eyes, fully alive, animated with the degree of |

liers 1977, p.337). |

reality that your creative Good Will has inspired in me (Vil-

Can one help but recall the role of the female body offered as food for male fantasy by early film-makers? More generally, can

one help but compare Hadaly’s objurgations with Christian Metz’s magisterial description (1982, pp.133-4) of the mode of existence of the spectator-subject in the cinema Institution:

LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 31

In the filmic state as in the daydream, perceptual transference stops before its conclusion, true illusion is wanting, the imaginary remains felt as such; just as the spectator knows that he

is watching a film, the daydream knows that it is a daydream.... Film viewing, like daydreaming, is rooted in contem-

plation and not in action. Both suppose a temporary, largely voluntary, change in economy by which the subject suspends his object cathexes or at least renounces opening a real outlet for them.

Add the fact that, among her ‘wholly animal’ perfections, Miss Alicia counts an admirable singing voice, and one can say that, in his recreation of the Edison legend, Villiers anticipated many of the aspects of the ideology characteristic of the socio-historical

space in which the non-fictional Father of the Phonograph moved.© However, by making Edison the champion of his own

critique of the bourgeois era in the name of a lost aristocratic paradise, Villiers (ironically, presumably) was historically astray.

For Edison, the astute businessman, was certainly a man of his

time who, while awaiting filmed opera, had no hesitation in allowing his associates to focus the Kinetograph on disreputable

(and illegal) boxing matches, in order to profit from the first box-office successes known to moving pictures.’ For Dickson and

the other men who collaborated in productions for the Kinetoscope (in this case, the Latham brothers) quickly found subjects that answered to the tastes of the social strata that frequented the locations where their slot machines could be profitably installed:

penny arcades in the USA, market fairs and funfairs in Great Britain and Europe. The success of the Kinetoscope was partly due to this show-business sense. But it was also due to the

extraordinary novelty it represented, and all the histories emphasise that in the end this success was the same as that of a whole series of scientific marvels (X-rays, the Phonograph, etc.) to which the masses only had access as fairground phenomena but which as such were supposed to give the deprived an optimistic vision of the future of industrial society.

The failure of the firm’s productions from 1896 on in comparison with those of the Lumiere company is probably to be attributed to the powerful magic exerted by the ‘scenics’ that the 32 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

latter revealed to the world which continued to work throughout the primitive period (see p.51 below). Dickson did transport the cumbersome Kinetograph out of the Black Maria (in 1894), but always, it seems, in order to shoot in a manner close to the ‘centripetal’ images against a black background taken in the studio. And the attempts to imitate the Lumiere films after their eruption into the American market continued to suffer from the weight of the equipment and an already ‘outdated’ conception of mise-en-

scéne. In fact this first failure of Edison in competition with French films is in certain respects comparable with that of the Film d’Art in France in 1908-1910. In either case it was a matter

of an attempt to fulfill a wish while the conceptual, if not the material means were still lacking. Today it is clear that Edison, Dickson and their various collaborators in certain respects anticipated what was to become the IMR. But given their inability to create an analogue ‘a la Hadaly’, and especially to invent at one

go a system able to solicit, to sustain a ‘willing illusion’ equivalent to that intended by Villiers’s Edison, but also by the

real Edison, their black backgrounds are merely a_ remote prefiguration of the falling-off lighting that came into being around 1915. On the other hand, the picture of Dickson playing the violin by an enormous Phonograph horn produces an intolerable contradiction in the context of these aspirations to the faithful reproduction of Life. Contradictions of the same kind recur

throughout the primitive period, to which all the work of Dickson/Edison belongs. The Lumiێre picture, on the contrary, even when not showing

the features of a baby ‘as if under a microscope’ or adumbrating narrative closure as in Arroseur et arrose, does /ive in its own way. It is non-linear, non-centred, impossible to grasp on first viewing, true, but it provides, as it were, a sense of closeness to

reality, precisely insofar as the latter itself is non-centred, unclosed, non-linear, ungraspable on first viewing. This 1s no longer (not yet) a question of the construction of the real in the manner of naturalism, but of a picture which, while not an analogue of reality, is nonetheless the singular result of an encounter between the cine camera and ‘raw reality’. The attraction these films still exert on us lies here. However, I have no intention of

assigning Edison to an (unsuccessful attempt at) bourgeois LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 33

representationalism, Lumiére to popular (or scientistic) presentationalism. The pleasure Lumiére himself and his spectators yester-

day and today obtained and obtain from his films does indeed emanate from an analogical effect (produced by photography whatever one’s intentions), but from one which is non-linear and acentric, which does not locate the spectator subject at the centre of an imaginary space; that is why I believe the pleasure—and also the knowledge—he produced is of quite another kind from the pleasure of the Institution to come.

And yet. , |

It can also be argued that these Lumiere films and the practices deriving from them are at the root of what can be isolated as the documentary ideology, an ideology still, of course, very much alive

today, but one which at the time took a particularly acute form we should look into.

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Its sudden changes made the scenery rushing rapidly past almost a series of coloured pictures .... The lens dived down to the Villefranche harbour, picking up en route the grey masses of the battleships, constantly cut off by the series of telegraph

poles or the darkness of tunnels. | This description of his shooting of a train trip as if the train itself

were a film—a shooting carried out shortly after he left the Lumiére company, in which he had been one of the first and the most talented cameramen—is by Félix Mesguich (1933, pp.27-8). I shall return to him, because we owe to him a true credo of the documentary ideology. But first we should get better acquainted

with another important character in early cinema, one closely linked to the gradual strengthening within primitive cinema itself

of a more dynamic, more conquering, more proprietary concep- | tion of representation: I mean the railway.

The first appearance of a train in the history of moving |

34 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS :

pictures seems certainly to be Lumiére’s famous Arrivée d’un train

a La Ciotat of 1895. Today there are at least two versions of this film, which at any rate testifies to the constant concern of the first real film-maker to improve the quality of the effect produced by his moving photographs. But his privileging of the shot in this

way, and the fact that his cameramen produced remake after remake all over the world (Alexandria, Jaffa, Melbourne, Tokyo,

etc.), stem not only from the symbolic place of the train in the spectacle of industrial progress it was felt apposite to offer to the masses, but also from the extraordinary effect of depth produced

by a framing that makes the train arrive towards the spectator. This being so, it is not surprising that the shot was reproduced hundreds of times by the cameramen of all the producing countries for years, in fiction films, too, nor that it was with a re-

edition of this same shot that Louis Lumiére himself was to demonstrate his three-dimensional film process to the Paris Académie des Sciences forty years later. And the railway, with its

direct, penetrating movement, an impressive image of the ‘conquest of new spaces’, both pictorial and geographic, by industrial

power, was to mark the history of the cinema in spectacular ways, from The Great Train Robbery to Das Stahltier, via La Roue, The Iron Horse, Turksib and La Bete humaine.

But at that time the railway was only just entering its golden age, it had only recently become the modern means of transport, it had just granted ‘Mr. and Mrs. Everyman’ the new possibility of following in the footsteps of the great explorers of earlier centuries (the Orient Express began in 1883, the Trans-Caspian line opened in 1893). Of course, to go and stroll in Samarkhand or Istanbul cost money: the myth of the globe trotter first took root among the bourgeoisie, but the cinema helped to extend it as a fantasy through other strata. This was the principal task undertaken by the Lumiére cameramen, traversing the globe, hands on their brass cranks. The films they brought back, long described as ‘scenics’, were such as to satisfy the new thirst for remote places and to sustain the colonial enterprise. But for those who could aspire to a real acquaintance with the streets trodden by a

Loti or a Larbaud, these films long continued to exhibit the defects Gorky saw in the earliest Lumiére subjects. For, whether produced by Pathe, Urban, Warwick, Edison or Biograph, the LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 35

Lumiére model seems to have remained in force for at least a decade.®

However, nine years after the shooting of Arrivee d’un train a La Ciotat, eight years after Promio first (perhaps) introduced the ‘tracking shot’ in a ‘scenic’, filmed from a gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice, the USA, the country with the most spectacular growth of the railways,? was the birthplace of a curious enterprise

combining cinema and railway train, with the avowed aim of overcoming the ‘alienating’ obstacles so well described by Gorky. A new credibility, a new presence was to be given to the Lumiére tableau. Visitors to the 1904 Saint Louis Universal Exhibition, as they

tried the first ice-cream cones and hot dogs, attended the first public demonstrations of Lee DeForest’s system of wireless teleg-

raphy and sampled the sound cinema of the German pioneer Oskar Messter, were also introduced to a first version of Hale’s Tours.

If this curious attraction was indeed exhibited at Saint Louis as its inventor, a certain William Keefe, envisaged, it consisted of a railway carriage with one side missing travelling in a circular tun-

nel whose wall formed an endless screen. Pictures shot from a moving train were to have been projected onto this screen.

The purpose of this entertainment device was to provide the passengers with a fairly faithful representation of the scenes

which they would see if they were to take a real train ride through scenic areas of the world, incorporating motion pictures which were to have been photographed from a real moving train. The illusion of the ride was to be heightened by the

use Of an unevenly laid track which would cause the car to sway and vibrate, thus suggesting a high rate of speed. Some sort of wind-producing machine was to be used within the tun-

nel to produce a rush of air throughout the length of the car. Presumably, a variety of appropriate sounds would also have been produced—the rush and roar of the steam engine, a whis-

tle, the clanks and groans of the car, and so forth (Fielding 1973, p.17).

In the months that followed, the formula became less 36 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

spectacular but more manageable, but the illusion of travelling remained central to the undertaking: in the next stage the real journey was reduced to going to and from the ticket sales point and a stationary carriage in which the projections took place and to which the shuttle coach was attached. Finally, the formula according to which Hale’s Tours were known throughout the world for seven prosperous years only used a single stationary ‘carriage’. This

provided a number of seats for its passengers, suitably inclined upwards towards the rear to provide good sight lines. Through

the open front, the audience viewed a motion picture which | had been photographed from the cowcatcher of a moving train, and which was thrown onto a slightly inclined screen from a motion-picture projector situated in a gallery above and slightly behind the car. The size of the screen, the distance

of the screen from the car, and the distance of the projector from the screen were intended to provide an image which covered the entire field of vision of the car’s occupants and which was ‘life size’ (ibid., p.18).

George C. Hale, who had purchased the idea from Keefe to exploit it in partnership with a magistrate named Gifford, had been fire chief in Kansas City and had made himself famous by organising ultra-realistic demonstrations of modern fire-fighting techniques at international conferences in Europe in 1893 and 1900 (we will see later the considerable importance of the still novel institution of the professional fireman in the iconography of early cinema in Britain and the USA). It seems likely that his sense of a spectacle ‘as if you were there’ derives from these antecedents, which recall Belasco, but also Daguerre.

Hale introduced his Tours towards the end of the primitive

period, of course, and the problem they were supposed to overcome—the spectator’s ‘exclusion’ from the classic primitive picture—had already received the beginnings of solutions from Smith, Williamson, Porter, etc., while the decisive advances of a Griffith and a Blackton which would make them obsolete were already close at hand. But what is relevant to us here is the fact that all the extraordinary devices (decor, sound effects, swaying) LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS 37

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There is no doubt that the temperance movement deserves the credit for giving a decisive impetus to the development of the magic lantern in Britain and conferring on it the truly industrial

scale it acquired in the last few decades of the Victorian era. Beyond the enormous networks of customers it provided, such as the Band of Hope (a movement for the early indoctrination of the children of the poor with the temperance message), a lay magic lantern movement also grew up. Smith and Hepworth, for example, only ever seem to have presented purely entertaining or instructive shows in lecture halls like that of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. But temperance lanternists were quick to realise that to draw and retain their popular audiences—who

were often illiterate, and hence inaccessible to the flood of temperance literature that had been issued since the 1840’s—it was not enough to show them ‘documentary’ pictures, usually drawings illustrating the history, manufacture and awful consequences of the consumption of beer, gin, etc. One had to make up a varied programme in which, say, a brief comic monologue (five or six slides painted with prettily coloured pictures) was followed by a ‘Chromatrope’ (an ingenious kaleidoscope-like effect animated by a slow, hallucinatory gyratory movement‘ thanks to

the rotation of one sheet of glass over another), then a spectacular transformation deriving from Daguerre’s dioramas and achieved by the slow superimposition of two or even three light beams from quite technologically sophisticated projectors (e.g., a sunlit railway station—night slowly falls—the signals change to

green and a train passes). Also common were ‘travel’ series, which constituted the main substance of lay lanternism, but also an important proportion of the complementary programme of the temperance lanternists, and gave rise directly to the exotic (and colonialist) scenics of the early cinema.

But the turning point in the history of the magic lantern, and also a product of the temperance movement, was the introduction (by the Bamforth company) towards the end of the 1860’s of ‘life models’. These were fairly long series of slides (some as long as

fifty or more)? made by photography and subsequently hand86 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

coloured. The scenes illustrated were posed by real people in often quite elaborate artificial settings. The stories told were of a highly edifying kind, usually with unhappy ends, and usually (but

not always) directly illustrating the ravages of alcohol. In my

opinion there can be no doubt that the spectacular ‘breakthroughs’ of British film-making in the very early years, i.e., the astonishing premonitions of the IMR it exhibits, derive from the tradition of life models—which, although they were exported and widely exhibited in the USA, France and elsewhere, seem almost all to have been made in Britain. The magic-lantern show did, of course, remain essentially anillustrated lecture. The texts published to go with the series often have several hundred words for each slide, so a twenty-minute lecture may have required only a dozen pictures (by comparison, modern tape-slide presenters regard ten seconds per slide as a maximum). From the few indications that we have, it seems that this very prolix style often served as a model for the first film lecturers. But at any rate, it seems likely that, helped by the lecturer, the relationship the magic-lantern spectator maintained with the projected pictures was an exploratory one, a feature that was, to a certain extent, to characterise the cinema in its most primitive form.

However, as the life models developed, staging techniques emerged that prefigure not so much the primitive mode, but more the central procedures of the IMR that superseded it. The most important of these 1s a certain ubiquity of the cam-

era. In many of these slide sequences, the spectator follows a series of moments in a single setting rendered by pictures of different shot-scale and sometimes even from different angles. Usually, it is true, the changes of shot-scale and angle are pretty small, of an order that the IMR was explicitly to condemn for the crime of ‘Iése-continuite’. However, I am convinced that the reason why the (British) Gaumont film-maker Alf Collins, in a 1905 film called When Extremes Meet, could change the angle | from which the same subject was shot at a time when such a figure was simply unthinkable in any other producing country,° is the lanternist ‘legacy’. One might also refer to the changes in shot-scale (cut-ins) in Rescued by Rover (1905), changes which are

quite small—from ‘long shot’ to ‘medium shot’—and thus quite GENTLEMEN OF THE LANTERN 87

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SS LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

comparable to those observed in many life-model series. On the

other hand, from the few samples I have been able to see,’ insert | close-ups do not seem to have been very common in life models. It does seem that Smith’s famous film Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900?)—a series of insert close-ups showing what is seen after

views of the act of looking—derives from a lantern show, but that was the presentation of a ‘trick’ rather than a life model in the strict sense. More pertinent here is the set called The Auction.

It consists of a series of close-ups of lots displayed in a sale room, commonplace objects—mattresses, shoes, etc.—in a particularly advanced state of decrepitude, which the last verse of the brief poem accompanying the pictures describes as the effects of a

poor wretch who fell victim to alcohol. The last picture of the | series shows us full length the character supposed, presumably, to have delivered (off-screen) the sinister words of the commentary, _

a kind of preacher-cum-auctioneer who stands forth before the

spectators to point the moral. |

Generally speaking it seems that the many experimental uses of

insert close-ups in early British films—especially those of Smith—come not directly from lantern-slide practices but as an extrapolation of them. Moreover, it seems even that there was a kind of taboo against the close-up for the lanternists, at least if we can believe the following article from the The Optical Magic

Lantern Journal: :

Size, independent of anything else, has the power to affect an

audience—or the more educated and intelligent portion of it—pleasantly or unpleasantly, as it may be suited to the subject shown. Pictures exhibited much above their normal size have a more or less grotesque appearance, especially if containing figures. Landscapes pure and simple only on rare occa-

sions give rise to criticism in this respect; but take flowers, figures, or anything of such dimensions that they can be easily compared or exaggerated. The screen proclaims their unreality, which is at once strikingly apparent (Moore 1894, p.56).

It seems legitimate, on the one hand, to see here a suggestion as to why the cinema so slowly accepted the insert close-up (generalised only after some twenty years), but also as to why the ‘film GENTLEMEN OF THE LANTERN 89

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90) LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

portrait’ so easily became an autonomous and important genre, following Repas de bebe. Indeed, one can easily imagine that the author of these lines would have had no trouble with the photographic portrait inaugurated some fifty years earlier, examples of which were common in lantern shows of the ‘collage’ type (e.g., portraits of John Wesley in the many series of disparate pictures illustrating the exemplary career of the founder of Methodism). As the article suggests in passing, the difficulty arose when there was comparison, when the close-up was inserted into a context which established a scale of reference. We are dealing here, in fact, with an index of the strength of the resistance offered by the exteriority of the ‘pre-institutional’ projected picture, an exteriority that implied a unique point of view and had to give way to a degree of internalisation (identification of the spectator-subject with the viewpoint of a mobile camera) for the IMR to emerge. At one time—exactly when I cannot ascertain, but it was certainly well before the turn of the century—certain published lec-

tures still contained remarks referring to the pictures as such: ‘Here is a typical picture showing us Scrooge in all his miserliness ... “At the rear of this picture we see the door behind which sits

Mr. Smalley, Scrooge’s clerk..... (examples drawn from a lifemodels adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol). This practice remained current in travel series in which, generally speaking, there was no continuity effect fusing the pictures into a ‘seamless’

whole, and comments of the type ‘here is a picture of the Pantheon’ were more or less unavoidable—it was neither necessary nor possible to tone down the exteriority of the picture. But I am absolutely convinced that professional lecture-writers had quickly realised, especially with life models (drawn subjects, particularly the comic ones aimed at children, seem to have used the designatory mode more frequently), that allusions to the picture

as such destroyed the nascent diegetic illusion. | 2 2 OR cok

Almost all the ‘visionary’ pioneers of British production were familiar with photography and the magic lantern: Hepworth, — GENTLEMEN OF THE LANTERN 91

Smith and Williamson were photographers and lanternists, R.W. Paul dealt in photographic materials and projection equipment in Brighton, Mottershaw did the same in Sheffield, while the Bamforth company had been one of the most important names in the manufacture of lantern slides for many years. The contrast with the socio-professional origins of the first recruits at Patheé’s, for

example, is striking (see pp.72f. above). When the British historian Roy Armes (1978, p.17) states that ‘from the beginning films were entertainment artefacts made by bourgeois manufacturers for the urban working classes,’ he is simply summarising an obvious fact. There is a striking contrast both in manifest content and in ‘language’ between the predominantly populist cinema of France and what has to be called the middle-class cinema of Williamson, Hepworth, Smith and co. When Smith, in 1900, filmed fragments of a pantomime based on Robinson Crusoe acted by middle-class Brighton children—it seems he was commissioned to film dozens of them—he was not

content to frame the proscenium ‘a la Méeliés’, but inserted a medium close-up of the girl playing Robinson standing on a raft while a painted backcloth unrolls behind her. And Williamson, doing his bit towards the conditioning of public opinion against

the anti-imperialist rising known as the ‘Boxer Rebellion’, deployed an alternating editing system close to shot-reverse-shot in the 1903 version of Attack on a China Mission.’ In the same year his fine comedy The Dear Boys Home for the Holidays, as

well as giving an astonishingly naturalistic depiction for the period of a life style which is manifestly that of Williamson himself (the actors are his own family), is organised according to a remarkably precocious system of contiguity syntagms (cf. p.209 below), prefiguring Griffithian topography. Georges Sadoul sug-

gests (1973, t.JII, p.249) that the class character of this filmmaker’s work is tempered by a certain ‘social tendency’: ‘William-

son, Haggar and Mottershaw generally side with the humble, as does R.W. Paul.’ Haggar, certainly, in his origins and vocation was an authentic representative of the populist fairground cinema whose British version I shall discuss below, but neither Paul nor, especially, Williamson can be located anywhere but in the ideological space of a completely conformist middle class, the class of which he, Smith, Melbourne-Cooper and Hepworth especially 92 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

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BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 115

‘composed view’. The result was the most moralising and edifying films the primitive cinema ever saw, films perfectly matching the spirit of vaudeville and its audience, at least in principle. This moralism went far beyond classic themes such as temper-

ance (omnipresent nonetheless) or the principle that crime does not pay. A quite astonishing number of films pretend to intervene ‘instructively’ in all the aspects of urban everyday life, with

the manifest intention of assisting in the adaptation of all the newly arrived country bumpkins to urban technology. The result was a Series of ‘genres’ which seem to be absolutely unique to the USA.

There were films warning against the dangers of gas, such as They Found the Leak (1902), in which a group in nightshirts ven-

ture into a dark cellar with a lighted candle to look for a gas leak, paying for their imprudence with a visually derisory but appropriately deadly explosion. Another example is Porter’s minor masterpiece of black humour, Another Job for the Under-

taker (1901), in which the obligatory bumpkin enters a hotel room and totally ignores a large notice advising him not to blow out the gas jet that lights the room; alas, he is illiterate; he does blow it out, goes to bed—and there follows a stock shot of a funeral procession.© A less macabre variant on the same theme is The Light That Didn’t Fail (1902), in which the bumpkin, after a series of comic attempts to blow out the electric light, wraps it in his carpet bag to get some darkness to sleep by. Here the title is a comic allusion to Kipling’s famous story The Light that Failed, just the kind of joke to flatter the vaudeville audience and its modicum of culture.

The theme of the bumpkin arriving in the city and finding a technological civilisation beyond him or disorientating customs is

very widespread. One of the most popular series was that of Uncle Josh, a character whose advanced age could only add to the degree of his amazements. In Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Porter, 1902), the hero is in a stage box watching various filmed tableaux from the Edison catalogue projected onto a

screen of stretched cloth; his amazement and his naive belief in the projected picture are so strong that he tries to kiss the dancing girl, is terrified by the train advancing towards him, and finally, trying to get to grips with a ‘seducer’, tears down the

116 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS ,

screen to reveal behind it a furious projectionist. Here was an auto-reflexive demonstration of one wonder of technology quite in the spirit of Harry Houdini’s very materialist demythifications of his own ‘magic’. As for the sucker who conceives the unlucky notion of having a drink with a prostitute, he quickly learns How They Do Things on the Bowery (Edison, 1902): she drugs his whiskey and relieves him of his wallet and watch, and as he leaves the

bar he is arrested, presumably for vagrancy! |

The cleverness of these warnings lies in the fact that they make

vaudeville customers laugh at the expense of those they might once have been but no longer want to be, their cousins newly arrived from the country. By laughing at them the new citizens could feel that, by contrast, they were well integrated into urban life.

This is not the only way these films bear the imprint of their main intended audience. These members of the lower middle class were also interested in the professional activities of such guardi-

ans of property as the firemen and police of a great city (Life of an American Fireman and Life of an American Policeman, Porter 1903 and 1905, respectively). And although the vaudeville audience was socially homogeneous, it was sexually mixed. A film like The Unfaithful Wife (Biograph, 1903), in which the wife refuses

to give up her lover and flouts her husband until he kills her and

commits suicide, could have appealed to the fantasies of both sexes in a period when women were acquiring a quite new independence that threatened male domination. In The Burglar (Biograph, 1903), it is the wife who catches the intruder, while

the husband hides behind her. :

On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely that the many literal filmings of vaudeville turns could have had any other use, presented in the context of a live show, than to empty the house indeed.

But however substantive the affinities between this audience and the films it saw at the vaudeville, it was a quite different audience that flooded into the nickelodeons when, from 1906, the latter took over from the over-specialised Hale’s Tours.’ For at least four or five years, the bulk of the urban nickelodeon audience consisted of immigrants. Is it (merely’) for this reason that

the vaudeville audience did not go for several years, and that it | BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 117

required concerted efforts to give them a taste for cinema as an essential step towards the constitution of a mass audience? _

TrTrtr TTS How did immigrants satisfy their leisure needs at the turn of the century, living as they were in a country in which everything was strange to them?

In some great urban centres where there was a sufficient con-

centration of immigrants, foreign-language theatrical companies flourished until the turn of the century. Was the disappearance of most of these troupes a result of the increasing accessibility of the cinema show, or rather an effect of the phenomenon of Americanisation in general? Whatever the case, it seems that, although the poorest immigrants—the sweat-shop workers—did go to these theatres, they had to make considerable sacrifices to do so, for in 1898 seat prices were four or five times those of the future nickelodeons (see Corbin 1898).

Men among the immigrants are also known to have frequented the low-level variety shows known as ‘burlesque’, or rather “bur-

leycue’, the Americanised pronunciation helping to distinguish between the classic nineteenth-century burlesque—a theatre of parody with European origins—and the striptease and clowning — show for men only® that emerged from it late in the century.

Then there were the penny arcades, amusement parlours con- | taining rows of slot-machines of all sorts. People spent a few hours in them between supper and bed or visited them on rest days at only a tiny cost and even in the hope of winning a derisory prize or a few cents to enable them to stay longer. As we know, the first phonographs (with cylinders and earphones) appeared here, as did the first Kinetoscopes and Mutoscopes in the period when Edison and the founders of Biograph thought that moving pictures would be most profitable on an individualviewings basis. When, subsequently, collective viewing sessions were organised with the Cinématographe and the Vitascope, they took place in tiny halls at the back of the penny arcades, and it

was here that cinema strictly speaking was discovered by the 118 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

same poverty-stricken immigrants who were already the main

clients of the arcades. |

They also encountered films in other places, at the circus, in amusement parks, perhaps even at the vaudeville. But what were

they looking for and what did they find? Other than its low prices, what attracted the immigrants to the cinema? For throughout the period concerned, except for a few films made after 1910-11, precisely at a time when the audience was beginning to broaden, the American cinema only addressed immigrants as Other, when it deigned to acknowledge their existence at all. It is generally held that ‘the movies became for immigrants a powerful experience of the American culture which was often

denied to them, surrounding them with images, fantasies, and revelations about the New World’ (Ewen 1980, p.S51). An ItaloAmerican chronicler of the period described this experience: ‘Cold chills crept up and down his back as he witnessed thrilling scenes

of what he thought was really American life’ (Mangano 1917, p.7; cit. Ewen 1980, p.S51). Today, however, it seems more probable that the penny arcades, like the nickelodeons, were above all a social meeting-place, a haven of conviviality.

For if an immigrant, of no matter what origin, occasionally encountered a picture of a member of his own or one of the other new ethnic groups in these early films, that picture was hardly a sympathetic one. In Hot Mutton Pies (Biograph, 1902), a China-

man is selling them on a street corner. His customers discover they are really made of catsmeat and chase after him. Immigrants, it is clear, will eat anything. In the unusual The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers (Biograph, 1904), utterly

ridiculous fat Chinamen run a laundry, visit an opium den, and

inexplicably become the objects of the consuming passion of a group of women Sunday-school teachers. The racism—and sexism—of this film are almost surreal (but the obsession with miscegenation aroused by young women engaging in educational mission work at the time is evidenced by a number of newspaper articles). This film is dually inscribed in the ideological space of vaudeville: while making fun of these women’s stubborn commitment to an impossible task of ‘humanisation’—these people can

never be ‘like us’—it also attacks a kind of religion associated with the village which vaudeville saw it precisely as its mission to BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 119

combat. As for Porter, his astonishingly realistic depiction of the execution by electric chair of the Polish anarchist Czolgosz (Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison, 1901) is very much in the age-old tradition of public executions, the aim being

both to intimidate the immigrant masses and to satisfy lowermiddle-class curiosity. Finally, that ‘benign’ form of racism, ethnic humour, 1s echoed

in the filming of a turn subtly entitled Levi and Cohen, the Irish Comedians (Biograph, 1903).?

By about 1906, when the proletarian audience had begun, with the proliferation of nickelodeons, to become much more important for the cinema than its vaudeville-based middle-class audience, Biograph produced a series of films dealing with the ‘world

of work’ often seized on for their ‘social realism’.!9 The best known of these nowadays are The Tunnel Workers and Skyscrapers, both made by Frank Dobson in 1906. In the former, the conflict is essentially sentimental (the hero saves a rival’s life in an accident), and the characters have no ethnic marks, but in the latter it is unmistakably the immigrant who is the Other, and his extreme perversity—he is quarrelsome and treacherous—that propels the action. This is a conflict between a vindictive dishonest worker with foreign features called Dago Pete, and an immacu-

lately upright foreman with an Anglo-Saxon profile: sacked by the latter for fighting, the wretch tries to avenge himself by plant-

ing a watch he has stolen in the foreman’s house. Order and truth are restored thanks to the testimony of a little girl; Dago Pete is taken away by the police and the foreman 1s re-instated. With the exception of a few rare films produced more towards the end of the nickelodeon era,!! the cinema continued to ignore the existence of those who were its main customers for a crucial five-year period and more. The historian Russell Merritt (1976, p.72, n.18) has surveyed all the summaries of films published in The Moving Picture World in 1907 and 1908—1.e., at a time when the nickelodeon was well established and its audience well defined. I indicated his results

above (p.62). Out of 1,056 American films issued in a twentymonth period, only eight dealt with ‘immigrants or the poor’, while seven others made by Pathe and Gaumont in France dealt with similar themes. 120 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

Those who made the films continued to aim essentially at the audience of the vaudeville theatres, even if that had never been anything but a captive audience and hardly ever ventured into the new specialised houses. And those responsible for creating and running the latter shared the same attitude:

The five-cent theatre may have been widely regarded as the working man’s pastime, but the less frequently reported fact

was that the theatre catered to him through necessity, not through choice. The blue-collar worker and his family may have supported the nickelodeon. The scandal was that no one connected with the movies much wanted his support—least of all the immigrant film exhibitors who were working their way out of the slums with their theatres. The exhibitors’ abiding complaint against nickelodeon audiences—voiced with monotonous regularity in trade journals, personal correspondence,

and in congressional testimony—was that moviegoers as a group lacked ‘class’ (ibid., pp.65-7).

Adolph Zukor, a founder and first president of Paramount, began his cinematic career as a Brooklyn exhibitor in one of the many store-front theatres, showing films in the Hale’s Tours format to audiences presumably already consisting of other immigrants less well off than himself. His business prospered and ‘we were compelled to remove the cars which had lost all their attraction and put seats in our stores, thereby increasing the number of spectators’ (Zukor 1930, p.39).!2 Soon he opened a dozen cinemas in the New York region. ‘The novelty of the chase pictures

began to wear out, too, and about 1907 or 1908 we found ourselves where we could not carry on the business profitably. And anyway, no one had any money left’ (ibid.). Zukor is alluding to a brief recession that naturally first affected the least favoured strata, precisely the ones that were mostly immigrants and provided much of the nickelodeons’ clientele. This recession also affected the other industrialised countries (see p.56 above), but in the USA it served as a pointer for those who were to become the vanguard of the nascent film industry. Recessions pass, but was it wise, from a business point of view, to rely entirely on such a fra-

gile audience, one which a brief bout of unemployment would BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 121]

drive from the cinemas en masse? Would it not be better to attract a different audience? Here 1s Zukor again: ‘I had taken about fourteen leases and found myself where I had to go through bankruptcy to get out of the leases or else continue in business. I chose to continue in business’ (ibid.).

What he did was to import from Europe the three-year-old Pathé Vie et passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1906 or 1907) and attempt to conquer a new market:

We arranged for an organ and a quartet to play and sing appropriate music. I did not dare open in New York. So we tried it first in Newark. We were on a street adjoining a big department store and opened up Monday morning. A great many of the bargain hunters—I mean the ladies—dropped in early to see and hear the performance. As they walked out, I stood at the door eager and anxious to hear the comments. People with tears in their eyes came over to me and said ‘What a beautiful thing this 1s’ (ibid., pp.39-41). The choice of a religious subject shows how, even in this exper-

imental period, Zukor was concerned to attract both an immigrant Christian audience and a lower-middle-class audience of rural origin. The quotation also emphasises the importance to this generation of entrepreneurs of the conquest of a feminine audience as a guarantee of bourgeois respectability. Russell Merritt (1976, p.73) writes:

The problem was how to lure that affluent family trade.... The

answer, at times conscious but more frequently a matter of convenience, was through the New American Woman and her children. If few professional men would as yet, by 1908, consider taking their families to the nickelodeon, the women on a

- shopping break, or children out from school, provided the ideal life line to the affluent bourgeoisie.!3 .... In a trade hungry for respectability, the middle-class woman was respectability incarnate. Her very presence in the theatre refuted the vituperative accusations lodged against the common show’s corrupting vulgarity.

122 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

This appeal to women soon manifested itself in the content of | the films themselves too: ‘Female protagonists far outnumber males, dauntless whether combatting New York gangsters, savage Indians, oversized mashers, or “the other woman’” (ibid., p.73).!4 As I have said, for these entrepreneurs the ideal audience was the puritan audience of vaudeville. It is therefore hardly surpris-

ing that the cinema that had hitherto fought against often petty local censorship and the campaigns of the various legions of decency turned now to organising its own censorship system. Between 1906 and 1909 there is a remarkable change in the content of films. Edifying though they may have been hitherto, their

warnings against pickpockets and other perils of the city went with a certain element of voyeurism vis-a-vis vice and shocked a bien-pensant audience by nakedly revealing an urban society in which crime and violence were already out of control (cf. especially the astonishing Biographs A Rube in the Subway, 1905, and The Streets of New York, 1906). Griffith’s approach to crime a

Code. ,

few years later—a member of the middle classes successfully

defends himself against the tramp’s invasion—bears witness to an idealisation, a concealment of reality that was to become the rule

for more than fifty years, until the end of the reign of the Hays

Other innovations were also intended to attract a respectable audience. The institution of uniformed ushers still in force in

large exclusive houses in the USA today was created, providing a kind of pseudo-police force whose averred function was to control the noisy, popular elements of the audience and to reassure

its middle-class component. Some exhibitors attempted, as Marcus Loew did in 1907, to combine vaudeville turns with films

in the cinema show, a practice that lasted until the end of the silent period.

Zukor then decided to hand his cinema over to a consortium and go into production. Having heard that Sarah Bernhardt was an enormous hit in a play called Elisabeth d’Angleterre, in 1911 he followed in the footsteps of the Film d’Art (it is significant that in this drive to ‘raise the level’ of the cinema he thus made a

second appeal to France, the mythical land of culture), invested | in the filming of the play, and launched the film in the legitimate

theatres of several large towns. It is true that this decision to BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 123

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BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 137

It now seems clear, too, that this movement towards the IMR is partly the responsibility of film-makers capable of drawing cri-

teria for their innovations from bourgeois culture and with a ‘natural’ propensity, quite independent of any purely economic

motive, to address their own class. This hypothesis is corroborated by the counter-example of France discussed above. We have seen that the middle classes’ contempt for the cinema there

produced a historical delay, and also that this could be contrasted with the farsightedness of the middle class in Britain. We : might also have explored the astonishing Danish cinema, the first in the world made by members of the middle classes for members of the middle classes, ahead of Hollywood in a number of fields (lighting, even editing). Or the better known Italian cinema, in

which innovations and the embourgeoisement of the audience went hand in hand, once aristocratic patronage took over control.

But can we, for all that, claim that what I am tempted to call a ‘primitive mode of representation’ was truly the ‘property’ of ‘the lower classes’? It was certainly invented by members of the middle class—Meliés, Lumiere, Alice Guy—but, for seemingly diverse

reasons, they from the start adopted into their practice popular forms (the picture postcard, the strip cartoon, conjuring, musichall) that transmitted a tradition very remote from the bourgeois theatre they went to as members of their class. In the USA at this time, on the other hand, a form of spectacle more closely related to the music-hall and the caf’conc’—the thea-

tres of the poor in Britain and France respectively—than to the bourgeois theatre was the preferred entertainment for a whole new petty bourgeoisie, newly arrived from the villages and suspicious of the theatre for puritan reasons.

and France. |

It also seems well established that this American lower middle class was less fond of the earliest films than the masses of Britain

But one should, I believe, be very suspicious of the temptations of a populist reading here. On the one hand we know nothing at.

all about the real reactions of the popular audiences of the period. Were the classic historians right in claiming, for example, that early audiences quickly tired of the forms of early cinema? On the other hand the popular forms that clearly overdetermine 138 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

the mode of representation of these early films are anything but ‘pure’—they are often forms created from bits and pieces by the middle classes for the masses.

Finally, given that this mode of representation is largely defined only negatively—in a strict morphological sense it is — unmarked—this overdetermination may have been partly a matter of contingency, for this early ‘system’ 1s also the ‘simplest’ way a film camera could have been used.

NOTES | 1 Which the immigrants eventually internalised as an ethnic rivalry—‘we Irish are better than you Poles’—that is the source of the divisions and weaknesses of the American working class from its origins to this day (see Arnault 1976, pp.230-31, and 1972, pp.132-3).

2 Need it be pointed out that, although the cinema audience has become diversified and specialised in recent years in the industrialised countries, this ‘expanded target’ remains the ideal of American commercial television, vigilant in its efforts to produce an endless chain of ‘least objectionable programmes’?

3 Of course, starting in 1911, McCay himself drew for animated films which are amongst the earliest masterpieces of the genre. 4 Robert C. Allen (1980) claims that the vaudeville audience was immediately very taken with films. But one senses in his book a need to over-rate the role of vaudeville—and with it the American middle class’s fascination for cinema from its birth—arising from the internal logic of a US doctoral thesis. Charles Musser (1984), on the contrary, points out in support of the idea that films served to empty the vaudeville houses between shows that they often stayed on the bill for as long as five weeks, whereas the variety programme changed weekly and the audiences were regular attenders.

5 The earliest criticism appearing in the trade press already attacks the ‘immorality’ of certain French films, and the censors later banned series such aS Fantomas and Zigomar. 6 The Finish of Bridget McKeen (Porter, 1901), subsequently copied by Smith in Britain (see p.197 below), 1s based on the same model.

7 What was the composition of the audience for Hale’s Tours? In principle, it was just as true of the USA as of Europe that the ‘scenics’ almost exclusively

projected in them were such as to attract the middle class. But in the great centres of immigrant settlement it seems likely that the latter provided much of that audience.

8 Elizabeth Ewen (1980) tells us that the cinema, unlike the tavern and the burlesque, was considered ‘permissible’ for the women of the immigrant BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 139

populace, and that they took considerable advantage of this permission. But was this true before the First World War? The testimony used to support the claim all dates from after 1918, a period when women from better-off strata had also begun to go to the cinema. 9 These ‘Irish’ comedians are hopeless, and they are bombarded with tomatoes that come from behind the camera. This precocious example of the staging of ‘reverse-field space’ is one among a whole series of US films that are ‘experimental’ in the same sense as some British ones. But the latter’s experiments are concerned with editing earlier and more often than the American ones. 10 They are somewhat similar to the Pathe films of the series including Au bagne and Au pays noir, insofar as they combine ‘scenic’ views with composed views. At the beginning of Skyscrapers, we see real labourers at work in documen-

tary shots not directly matched with the first shot of the fiction. A few modernist-inclined scholars have tried to make a film like this a kind of prefiguration of the discontinuities characteristic of modern cinema (Godard,

Solanas, Sara Gomez). But at this time, clearly, the distinction between fictional and real on the screen was still extremely fluid (think only of certain ‘actualities’ by Meliés or Pathé such as the two versions of the Mont Pelée eruption reconstituted in the studio but exhibited as documentaries). Even such striking (to our eyes) mixtures of material as, e.g., Un Drame en mer (‘Tragedy at Sea’, Velle, 1905) may not have been perceived as such by regular viewers of the period, or rather the mixed character was non-pertinent in a show consisting of discontinuities from beginning to end. If this is so, then the

shots that introduce Skyscrapers, although they seem to us to have all the marks of ‘documentary’ (people look at the camera—but the spectators in exterior scenes and even the actors themselves often looked at the camera at this time), are quite unambiguous to the historian: they prefigure a standard and even essential procedure of the future Institution, 1.c., the incorporation of stock shots or other material photographed ‘live’ into the diegetic flux without any visible break in continuity.

1{ Still later is the famous film The Italian (Reginald Barker for Thomas Ince, 1915): Beppo, a highly exploited Italian immigrant, sees his child die as a result of the insanitary conditions of the ghetto and the cruel indifference of a political boss. However, at the last minute he abandons his attempt at a horrible revenge—to bring about the death of the boss’s small daughter—and goes to meditate over the grave of his own son. But the fact that the film is narrated as a kind of tacit flashback by this same Beppo, now decently housed and dressed, is reassuring: the poverty is only temporary, no human tragedy is final in the land of free enterprise! (Tom Gunning has suggested to me that

this man was not intended to be Beppo, but the actor who played him, George Beban, in propria persona. Be that as it may, the textual effect and its ideological implications are the same.) | 12 The origin of the text translated into French in Zukor (1930) is not stated; it is close to, but not identical with Zukor (1927). In the translations in the text of this book, I have followed the wording in this last source except where the French version materially differs [Translator’s Note].

140 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

13 It is surely suggestive of the differences between the status of middle-class women in France and the USA—then as now—that their going to the cinema hardly had the same effect in France, where the masculine and feminine

1978). ,

spheres are more strictly segregated.

14. Even in 1917, when luxury cinemas had been built in residential districts inspired by the decor of the upper-class country club, free gifts of perfume were still being offered at the doors to attract women customers (see Gomery 15 It is surely a further sign of the ‘backwardness’ of French cinema that, with the exception of the voyeuristic films made for men only, the heroines of - French films are often far from constituting sex objects, right up to the end of

the First World War. |

16 The Danish cinema, early brought under the control of remarkably able figures from the bourgeois theatre, was the first cinema made by highly cultured people for their social peers, i.e., the first middle-class cinema in a full

sense. And these artists familiar with Strindberg, Ibsen and Byjornson broached themes like sexual passion, adultery, and unwed mothers, and hence were denounced as pornographic in the USA. Of 32 films copyrighted by Nordisk in the USA in 1911 and 1912, only two or three were actually distributed (see Bergsten 1973, pp.27-8). 17 Tom Gunning (1981) argues along essentially the same lines, noting in certain of Griffith’s films the characteristics of an emergent ‘middle-class language’.

| Charles Musser (1983), on the contrary, insists that the technico-economic instance 1s the most important: it was not the wish to replace a popular audience with a middle-class one that caused the change in ‘language’ but the sim-

ple economic logic of the transition from the artisanal to the industrial stage : within the cinema itself. But insofar as we are considering a product for which ideology was, as it were, the very substance (what the audience bought was above all sensation, emotion and experience, it was ideal), I find the ‘economic last instance’ hard to apply in a conjuncture as overdetermined as this one. And we should not underestimate the importance for the consolidation of the socio-economic situation in the USA of the apparent obliteration of class distinctions and the establishment of every possible instance of consensus.

18 I am grateful to Charles Musser for drawing this text to my attention. I am even more grateful to him for a conversation which enabled me to improve the present chapter enormously. 19 An ironic fate for Porter, who was surely far in advance of his contemporaries

between 1900 and 1906, and yet was so far ‘behind’ them in 1911 that he could be proclaimed the standard bearer of the enemies of the close-up! But is it too venturesome to suggest that the constitution of the cinematic subject via camera closeness, ubiquity, etc., demanded a new self-awareness on the part of the director? In his memoirs, Arthur C. Miller, recalling his move to Rex with Porter, remarks that the latter ‘was a pretty thorough mechanic and ... it

was the mechanical aspect of film-making that interested him the most’ (Balshofer & Miller 1967, p.45). The time did come (in 1911, in fact) when Porter ‘began to realise that directing was a full-time job, and concentrated on

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 141

it more than ever before. Nevertheless, it was a struggle for him to stay away from the camera. He ... found it necessary to be able to perform all the duties that went into making a moving picture, including the developing and printing of the film’ Gbid., p.49). Miller concludes: ‘However, the day of specialisation had arrived, and, of course, D.W. Griffith was the great example in the directing field as was Billy Bitzer as a cameraman’ (ibid.). Surely artisanal ubiquity had to cease for the oneness of the director-subject to be conveyed, via the ubiquity of the camera, to the oneness of the spectator-subject. 20 The fact that Bush himself was a professional lecturer does not mean that his calls for a wider use of lectures were not approved by the editors of The Moying Picture World and hence by a proportion of the trade and the audience (as is evidenced by letters published in the trade press of the period, not only in New York but also in London).

21 It is patent in all their articles on the subject that Bush and company explicitly linked the lecturer to the search for a ‘respectable’ audience; see especially the announcement of a visit to a cinema by a rather high-class lady lecturer, a certain Madame Lora Bona (Anon. 1910a & 1910b).

22 In the films of Abel Gance and other Frenchmen, as in those of Eisenstein and other Soviet film-makers, this ‘primitive survival’ was a factor of pedagogic distantiation, a last rampart against institutional absorption.

142 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

Passions and Chases—A Certain Linearisation

A large-scale narrative form first appeared in the cinema extremely early—but only a very elementary one. It is found in the boxing matches filmed for the Kinetoscope, first by the Lat-

ham brothers, then by Raff and Gammon. They consisted of series of one-minute shots (the length of a round) that could be viewed one after another through a Kinetoscope peephole by inserting a coin for each round. The culmination of this genre came in 1897 with the live shooting (all the previous ones were re-enactments) of a fight between Corbett and Fitzsimmons with a camera deriving from the Kinetograph, the Ceriscope. After ‘editing’, the film attained the then quite unprecedented length of

fifteen minutes. Despite the ‘documentary’ character of these films, they present one of the premises of what was to become the narrative concatenation of institutional editing, especially in the

suspense built up from one episode to the next for the spectator with a knowledge of the codes of the boxing match. In this we are

still at the heart of the primitive system; continuity and sequentiality are dependent on a competence outside the system of the film: he (or she) who does not know the meaning of the sequence of rounds, the rules of boxing, the secrets of tactics and strategy, will only perceive a series of exchanges of blows, repeated again and again until the final knockout, if such there be. By a large-scale narrative form I mean one that bodies forth articulations of the signified by means of articulations at the level

of the signifier, one in which discontinuities in the picture pro- | duce narrative meanings (in contrast, particularly, to those discontinuities which are due to accidental stoppages of the cam-

era and are common in the films of the early years, when such jump cuts were just semantic noise, whereas those of Godard, say, are meaningful). Narrativity could of course unfold ad libitum in the primitive tableau, but once a single narrative articulation was revealed by a discontinuity of the signifier, a decisive PASSIONS AND CHASES 143

threshold had been passed. This has happened for Porter, for example, with The Finish of Bridget McKeen or Another Job for

the Undertaker (see p.139 n.6 above), whereas it has not in Grandma’s Reading Glass (see p.89 above) despite the number of

its shot changes, because the latter only function descriptively and to satisfy the scopic drive, but are not narrative in the strict sense. |

The first manifestations of this biunivocal concatenation in the context of fiction properly speaking were the four versions of the Passion Play shot in 1897 and 1898—two in Paris (by Lear, and

later by Georges Hatot for the Lumiére company), a third in Bohemia by the American William Freeman, and a fourth in New York by Paley and Russell. The first two were more than ten minutes long, already an exceptional length for the period, but the others were close to or longer than half an hour! Given that no story other than that of the Passion of Jesus Christ attained such a length for more than ten years, it seems clear that

we are dealing with a privileged phenomenon, and one whose deeper meaning I am convinced has hardly been brought out by

the classic histories of the cinema. |

In fact what we have here is a brilliant illustration of the fundamentally contradictory nature of the primitive cinema, in which

one step ‘forward’ so often implies two steps ‘backwards’. The best way of grasping the nature of the system that was to emerge from the interweaving of all the advances of this kind that can be detected between 1897 and 1914 is to look more closely at this contradiction.

The origin of these various versions of the Passion story was quite directly ‘theatrical’: the cultural and touristic success at the end of the nineteenth century among a bourgeoisie now travelling en masse of folkloric spectacles like those of Oberammergau in

Bavaria and Horice in what is now Czechoslovakia (the latter was the Passion play filmed more or less in situ by Freeman). It 1s important to emphasise that this was a theatrical form descending

directly from the medizval mystery plays and still at the turn of the century having only minimal connections with the naturalism of the bourgeois theatre. Zdenék Stabla, who has written a study of Freeman’s film, describes the Hofice Passion Play as follows:

144 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

From the text of the Passion play, which was first published _ independently in 1892, it appears that two kinds of stage techniques were used, depending on the nature of the scenes and tableaux. Most scenes were of the traditional dramatic variety,

where the conflict between the individual characters was expressed mainly in the form of dialogue. There were about fifty of these tableaux, or to be more precise, brief acts and scenes. The so-called ‘live tableaux’ were of a completely different nature. These were introduced by a commentary given

by the choirmaster. There were 26 of these tableaux grouped

together in a number of sequences alternating with the dramatic scenes. They were more like pantomime than drama and were much better suited to the purposes of filming (1971, p.19).?

And in fact all the versions of the Passion play filmed between 1897 and 1907 consist of a series of tableaux vivants, preceded (separated) by the title of the tableau (ibid., p.3n.), and usually, one assumes, described by a lecturer (here arising quite logically from the original spectacle). Of course, the beginnings of an explanation for the existence of these filmed Passion plays can be found in this affinity between two silent arts. But this form of mime appeared before any other because the story of the Passion was an almost universally familiar one. Clearly, this was what allowed the promoters of these

films to go so decisively beyond the limits of the Lumiére or Dickson sequence shot and offer their audiences a long-lasting spectacle made up of a large number of tableaux vivants linked together in a sequence which everyone could be assumed to know. It

should be emphasised that almost any sequence of tableaux from one of these films—e.g., in the Lumiére La Vie et la Passion de

Jesus-Christ: ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, ‘The Flight into Egypt’, ‘Arrival in Jerusalem’, ‘Betrayal of Judas’, and so on for a total of thirteen numbers—would be completely lacking in nar- | rative meaning for any spectator ignorant of the basic teachings of Christianity. In most cases the pictures contain no intrinsic pointers to what makes one necessarily follow on from the previ-

ous one. Once Christ has grown his beard, at any rate, the sequence of the pictures could be radically altered without at all PASSIONS AND CHASES 145

troubling a spectator who did not already know, say, that ‘Arrest of Jesus Christ’? follows ‘The Holy Supper’ and precedes ‘The Resurrection’. Without a whole set of external referents, the innocent eye would see a kind of spiritual landscape, like the purely ‘topographic’ spectacle that ecclesiastical stained glass might offer

to the pagan eye. By contrast, for Christians—including nonpractising ones and non-believers brought up in a Christian tradition—these pictures follow an ineluctable order, the Order of orders, one might say, the progression of the most exemplary of all lives, the linearity of which, guaranteed by its sacramental gestures, can be seen in the West as founding any possible linearity. In fact, the Passion story was capable of establishing the principle of narrative linearity in the cinema a long time before a ‘syntax’

had evolved to provide for it also at the level of the relation between signifier and signified rather than at that of the referent alone, as is the case here (where the semiosis is the same as that in the boxing match). But at the same time—and this is a precocious manifestation of the kind of law of mutual inconsistencies that governs the whole

development of the primitive cinema—all these versions of the Passion story crystallise and exaggerate the fundamentally nonlinear characteristics of the ‘primitive tableau’, the ‘Lumiére model’. The tangle of contradictions these films gave rise to was to take more than twenty years to unravel. The imagery used in these Passion films, as in the ‘popular’ representations they reproduced, came from the Saint-Sulpician imagery of contemporary religious paintings. This borrowing added to the acentric, ‘panoramic’ constraints often attendant on the reading of this kind of painting a further series of constraints deriving from the introduction of movement into a flat picture. And here neither colour, three dimensions nor speech helped

compensate for the increase in reading difficulty. Georges Sadoul’s judgement of the Lumiére Passion film (1973, t.I, pp.372-3) is dismissive: ‘All they did is to photograph a series of

theatrical scenes, without in any way adapting the acting, the composition, the costumes or the staging for the cinema, inevitably giving an impression of confusion and complication on the screen.’ This is in fact the impression inevitable to a modern eye faced with very many films made in the first decade. But it is not 146 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

necessarily the one always felt by regular viewers of the period, to

whom the primitive cinema itself offered a certain ‘perceptual education’ (see p.155 below).

At all events, by 1897 there is no doubt that those who exhibited these Passion films to audiences, notwithstanding the familiarity of the story, felt the need to have their projections accompanied by lectures modelled both on magic-lantern lectures and on the folkloric plays’ own commentaries. These lectures had two functions: to sort out the ‘confused’ iconography, and to remind those in the ‘flock’ who might have forgotten them of the individual details of the ‘greatest story ever told’.

| I shall return to this ‘impression of confusion’ in relation to the issue of what I call the linearisation of iconographic signifiers. For

the moment I want to trace the development of the narrative linearisation, the installation of a biunivocal ‘cause-and-effect’ chain clearly initiated in these first Passion films.°

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In 1897, the British pioneer George Albert Smith shot a film of forty feet or so in front of a windmill on the downs near Brighton and called it The Miller and the Sweep: in front of his mill, a miller carrying a sack of flour accidentally bumps into a sweep with a sack of soot. A fight follows, in the course of which the miller is blackened with soot and the sweep whitened with flour. Up to this point the film consists of a typically mechanical low music-hall gag of a type reflected in other British films.* But towards the end of this short film, the miller runs out of frame pursued by the sweep (or is it the other way round?) and at the same moment a small crowd whose off-screen presence has in no way been signalled hitherto cross the screen after the two protagonists and the film only ends when the last of them has left the frame.

One would surely be wrong to claim this as the first chase film.

For a start, there may have been earlier ones in Britain or in France. Then again, insofar as chase films have a privileged posi- : tion in the history of the cinema from around 1903 it is because PASSIONS AND CHASES 147

they contain several shots. Nevertheless, given the whole later development that culminated in the IMR, this film made by a film-maker distinguished by his visionary powers points to the historical need which was answered by the chase film.

It has been suggested (Salt 1982) that this nascent chase and © the cinematic genre itself derived from the European tradition of vaudeville, in which it was indeed customary to organise a chase with a number of characters crossing the stage and supposedly continuing in the wings. This is in fact an example of the natural-

istic tendencies gradually invading all European theatre at the turn of the century. But in the cinema it acquired a more explicit

and broader meaning. To see in it no more than a mechanical consequence of a ‘theatricality’ not yet overcome would be to suggest that the extraordinary explosion of chase films in the fol-

lowing years was an ‘inexplicable fad’. On the contrary, it represented the second great gesture towards the linear chains of | the future IMR.

In The Miller and the Sweep, the entry and exit of the small crowd ‘coming from nowhere’ already suggests, in a way impossi-

ble for a chase in a theatre, where audience and actors occupy the same space, the existence of a /atent domain adjacent to the profilmic space of the primitive single set-up. It indicates an elsewhere that could be linked to that space by a relation of spatiotemporal succession, but only by virtue of a concatenatory principle that would constitute the first step on the way to the physiologically rational ubiquity of the Institution, still inconceivable in 1897.

One first major advance towards the discovery of this principle

was made with the first chase films properly so-called, which made use of the notions of both temporal succession and (more or less close) spatial proximity, without yet codifying the rules that would eventually anchor these successions and proximities in the spectator’s body. That is why the chain of the chase films is still basically committed to primitive externality. The British film-maker Williamson’s Stop Thief! (1901) presents

a chase structure which, while still extremely rudimentary, does nonetheless extend over three shots. The first shot of the film shows the motive for the chase—a tramp steals some meat from a

butcher’s boy—and its beginning; the second, the chase going | 148 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

on—pursued by the boy and several dogs, the tramp runs along a street; the third, its end—when the tramp hides in a barrel centre

frame, is caught there by the dogs and dragged out by the butcher’s boy.

It could be said that the device used in The Miller and the Sweep created a tension (in a sense Arroseur et arrosé had already

created the same tension). The primitive cinema then proposed

two resolutions of that tension. The first, maintaining the autarchic tableau, is embodied in a ‘remake’ of the Lumiére film

by Smith called A Practical Joke or A Joke on the Gardener (1898). Here the whole chase is confined to the frame, taking place round a tree. The film is a retreat from editing. But is it of any importance that the first known cinematic chase that adopts the other solution, i.e., editing, contains not two but three shots? A bipartite structure in which the signifiers of ‘beginning’ and ‘conclusion’ would be positively delimited by the linking of shot to shot, whereas that of ‘continuation’ would be principally an absence, would perhaps have constituted a violation of the ‘laws’ of narrativity which, as we know, demand this tripartite structure. Thus it 1s clear that these laws were in force from the most remote premises of the IMR.

At any rate, the second shot does contribute duration to Williamson’s chase, the installation of what Christian Metz has called ‘frequentative or durational editing’ (1966, pp.121-2; cf. | 1972, pp.65 & 120, 1974, pp.121-2, 127 & 131-3), and in particular it creates interstices in which the chase can be inferred to be continuing.” A series of only two shots would have given the impression of a chase stopping as soon as it had started. It would only have consisted of an exit from one space followed by an arrival in another, an effect equivalent to that of the classical ellipsis of the shot of the stairs, eliminating rather than designat-

ing the ascent of those stairs. |

These few suggestions prove, I think, that institutional continuity was born with the chase, or rather that the latter came

into being and proliferated so that continuity could be established.

But in one absolutely critical respect the primitive chase remains within the Lumiére model, in what I have called the autarchy of the primitive shot which still links it to the picture PASSIONS AND CHASES 149

postcard.© This autarchy reveals itself in two ways. First, for many years, and in every producing country, even when there are a large number of participants in the chase, each shot is obligatorily extended until they have all left the frame; and each shot also usually shows the entrance into frame of all the participants. Billy Bitzer’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1905), which seems so pedantic in these respects that one wonders whether it might not be a parody of this ‘tic’ of the chase film, appeared just as ‘cuts

on action’ began to be seen in Britain and France. This can be said to be the beginning of the emergence from the ‘primitive sphere’, of the disappearance of that autarchy. The other sign of primitive autarchy is more negative, marked

by an absence which helped to maintain the externality of the

spectator subject that I shall be discussing at length later (pp.165ff.). In Williamson’s film, the characters leave the first shot

on the left, enter the second one on the left and leave it on the right, and enter the third one on the right. In other words, there is as yet no observation of the ‘rule’ of direction matching that was later to guarantee a certain continuity (abolishing primitive autarchy) and to help to centre the spectator-subject. But despite this externality, despite the primitive autarchy that follows from it, showing a series of shots of people running after

one another was already to create a far greater sense of continuity than static tableaux could. And this was the role of the chase: to extend the film experience, to initiate a certain ‘ima- | ginary’ production of duration and succession exploiting an offscreen space which although it was still amorphous would eventually make possible the diegetic production characteristic of the institution. But at the same time the chase was to give rise to the first continuity matches, in other words, the first concatenations of an indexical kind, as opposed to those already coded in the symbolic (the lecturer’s speech for the Passion films) or iconic modes (to use Peircean terminology—see pp.209 & 231 n.10). Almost everywhere and at the same time film-makers decided to

organise the direction of their chases or runs along binomial lines: towards the camera/away from the camera. The dog’s run in Rescued by Rover is towards the camera while it is following the beggar woman who has kidnapped the baby, and away from it while it is returning home. Such innovations organise the shots 150 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

geographically, linking them together by connections that are visual but also purely indexical.

It is perhaps nearly tautological to say that classical editing’s system of spatial concatenation is based solely on the indexical order, while its temporal concatenation (succession/ellipsis, flash-

back, simultaneity) is based as much on the iconic order (night versus day, changes of clothes) as on the symbolic order (intertitles, dissolves, close-ups of clocks). But this distinction does perhaps make it easier to pose correctly certain questions of the history of film stylistics, questions which are beyond the scope of this book. Why is it, for example, that the only symbolic codes that have ever been specific to the cinema—all those special effects known as opticals (fades, wipes and dissolves in the sound

period, but also irises and vignettes in the silent)—have often become marginal or vanished entirely today (from the Institution, of course)? And why, with the exception of the opening fade-in and closing fade-out which still persist (and in a few cases dissolves), straight cuts have become the rule for all shot changes, temporal modes being differentiated via the non-specific codes of the cinema, the only other specific code still ‘in force’ being the one governing diegetic topography, 1..e., precisely the indexical match (matching direction, position or eyeline)? And above all, why is it that the processes of internalisation and naturalisation seem to be ever increasingly refined at the stylistic level without changing the IMR one iota as an infrastructure?

Insofar as these questions belong to the history of stylistics, they are beyond the scope of the present study. But to the extent that they suggest that the disappearance of the ‘punctuations’ of the pre-talky era was the object of a long drawn-out ‘struggle’ (which lasted until the 1950’s in Hollywood) precisely because they were the last traces of the process of building the IMR— whose naturalising vocation was better suited to the indexical mode than to the symbolic—their invocation is not perhaps out of place here.

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PASSIONS AND CHASES 151

As we have seen, the transposition to the cinema of the codes of

the Passion play or painting could not but aggravate the ‘crammed’, ‘confused’ character already noted in Lumiére’s urban

scenics. This aspect of the primitive tableau, which seems to demand a topographical reading, is absolutely crucial for the definition of the features of any ‘primitive mode of representation’. After 1900, certain efforts were made to simplify, to strip down the primitive long shot in order to make it easier to read (efforts which recall Dickson’s black backgrounds at Edison). But

even a film-maker like Porter, who shows this concern for simplification very early, sticks to the long shot ‘crammed with signs’ until 1906 (Life of a Cowboy). This is a kind of picture whose content can only be exhausted—sometimes even simply read—by a modern spectator, at any rate, after repeated viewings. Let me cite some other examples drawn from the American cinema, which was, of course, ‘behind’ the French and even British cinemas in compositional terms at this time, but nevertheless addressed significant audiences both inside and outside the vaudeville theatres.

A Rube in the Subway (Biograph, 1905) shows in a single shot

a highly ingenious set with trains that arrive and depart to the left and right of a central platform at the end of which a stair ascends. In this very small space a considerable crowd walks up and down, and in their midst the rube gets involved in a series of minor comic incidents which most modern spectators are absolutely incapable of deciphering at one viewing of the film. True, the rube character does appear in a number of films, so assiduous film-goers of the period could perhaps have registered him as the centre of the diegesis. ’

Then there is the first shot of the fine film photographed by Bitzer already referred to, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, which I first discovered in the important work Ken Jacobs has made from it. The shot shows a village square completely filled by a market

crowd and dominated by an acrobat in a white leotard and tights. Experience shows that the story enacted in this tableau is rarely readable to the modern eye at one viewing. Jacobs’s film, which analyses this scene for many minutes as if under a microscope is a good simulation of the process the eye conditioned by the modern Institution wants the film subjected to. It provides 152 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

the elements whereby its components can be linearised, torn from their simultaneity® to bring out not only the narrative centre of the picture but also all the signs around, during, before and after it that constitute its site, occasion, etc. This shot seems all the more significant when one realises that three years later Bitzer was to become Griffith’s preferred cameraman and that one of the first pieces of advice he is supposed to have given the new director (for his first film, The Adventures of

Dolly, 1908) was not to put his camera too far away from his subject (Bitzer 1973, p.66). It might seem to follow that this first shot of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son—which was a very popular film on its release—soon came to appear to him to be a mistake. And yet he was still to make what I regard as one of the authen-

tic masterpieces of the primitive cinema, The Kentucky Feud, characterised by exceptionally and uniformly long-framed shots in which this topographical reading is a constant requirement. What was its status in 1905?

At about this time, in his reflections on art, Rodin proposed the following analysis of Watteau’s The Embarcation for the Island of Cythera: ‘In this masterpiece the action, 1f you will

notice, begins in the foreground to the right and ends in the background to the left.” There follows a description of each of the successive scenes in the painting, which he demonstrates detail

the stages of one and the same galante progression. “You see, then, that an artist can, when he pleases, represent not only fleeting gestures, but a long action, to employ a term of dramatic art. In order to succeed, he only needs to place his personages in such a manner that the spectator shall first see those who commence

this action, then those who continue it, and finally those who complete it’ (1912, pp. 81-4).? This ‘guided-tour’ approach to the composition and reading of

pictures systematised in the perspective organisation of the Renaissance is still very fashionable among certain photographers

today, but it is more or less discredited for modernists. Even when it no longer adheres to a directly narrative model, it implies a linear arrangement of the visual signifiers in a biunivocal causal chain, in other words it implies their succession in time (‘the spectator shall first see this, then that’). It can be said of the Institutional cinema that when its principles of composition and lighting PASSIONS AND CHASES 153

were definitively established at the end of the 1920’s, the IMR had, thanks to the addition of movement, succeeded in what classical painting had only adumbrated, namely, the harnessing of the spectator’s eye.

But Rodin’s argument is also useful insofar as it clearly emphasises the profound kinship between the linearisation in diegetic space-time of the ‘simultaneous signs’ of the primitive tableau—achieved by the medium close-up which isolates or excerpts (1904-12)—-and the simple narrative linearisation already proposed half a decade earlier by the chase film.

In contrast with this linear model, it is striking how many tableaux and even whole films were shot in all the major produc-

ing countries up to 1914 (think of scenes from Fantomas or Judith of Bethulia) which demanded a topographical reading by the spectator, a reading that could gather signs from all corners of the screen in their quasi-simultaneity, often without very clear or distinctive indices immediately appearing to hierarchise them, to bring to the fore ‘what counts’, to relegate to the background ‘what doesn’t count’. !9

aR 2K 26 3k 2 OK OK ek Ok . As I have suggested, the lecturer represents the first attempt to linearise the reading of these pictures, which were often both too ‘autarchic’ to be spontaneously organised into chains and too uniformly ‘centrifugal’ for the eye to pick its way confidently through them. The lecturer served both to bring order to the perceptual ‘chaos’ of the primitive picture and to impress on the narrative movement a supplement of ‘directional necessity’ or con-

catenatory momentum. In their ratiocinatory pedagogy of the eye, Rodin the critic and the lecturer of the magic lantern, and later of the film, were closely allied.

However, the presence of lecturers at an increasing number of projection points between 1897 and 1908 or 1909!! could not but have had one contradictory effect, eventually resulting in their demise. This effect was one of ‘non closure’ and distantiation, in contradiction with the project of diegetic presence, of a certain 154 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

transparency of the signifier in which the linearising drive is a crucial component: reading the story as it were alongside the diegesis, the lecturer produced a disjunction in the signifying process similar to that produced by the narrator in the Japanese doll theatre (see Burch 1979, pp.72-4).

But lecturers were surely more than crutches for film-goers while they still held their place. In the long term they surely taught film-goers how to read the vast, flat and acentric pictures | have described. The regular spectator before 1910 surely learnt to be more alert to the screen than the modern spectator, more on

the look-out for the surprises of a booby-trapped surface. The commercial failure of Jacques Tati’s hilarious masterpiece Playtime, whose images frequently share this primitive topographism, confirms that we have lost the habit of ‘keeping our eyes open’ in the cinema.

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I have noted (see p.26 above) the appearance in Dickson’s, Demeny’s and then Lumiére’s work of the portrait! as an auto-

nomous genre in the three great producing countries. This phenomenon represents a first impulse towards diegetic presence

and the constitution of character in the cinema. But the main difficulty facing those film-makers whose historic task was to adapt to the cinema the essential gestures of classical theatrical, novelistic and painterly representation was not that of filming their actors from close to; this was something they had always done. It was that of integrating these close-ups and medium close-ups into the film, of presenting one after another long-shot tableaux and closer views, of achieving analytically the linearisa-

tion of the primitive tableau into a succession of pictures that would cut it up and organise it, making it legible.

Today we can easily embrace the itinerary of the process by which iconic signifiers were linearised: for some twenty years the primitive tableau, hegemonic in France until the First World War and still preponderant in the USA after 1910, guaranteed the co-

presentation of all the components of a scene. Even a tableau

, PASSIONS AND CHASES 155

showing only two characters offers an exchange of looks, for example, as a single unit with a complex meaning (x looks at y

before/while/after y looks at x). Division into two or more medium close-ups, quite apart from the greater proximity of the faces it provides, makes it possible to organise, to simplify this

‘action’ (x looks at y/y does not look at x, then looks at x/y meets x’s look, then turns away, etc.).

A situation that the pure primitive cinema could not resolve

‘plausibly’ was that of the voyeur (or voyeuse). The corepresentation of a man or woman looking and the object he or she looks at never plausibly establishes the invulnerability of that look. I am thinking, of course, of the archetypal voyeur film with the husband hidden behind the curtains, but also, as late as 1913, of a dramatic scene (the gipsy woman Lyduschka watching Balduin in Stellan Rye’s admirable Der Student von Prag, “The Student of Prague’). This archaism is often found in Griffith’s Biograph films, in which it already constitutes an obvious deficiency:

the supposed tramp hidden behind the bureau spying on the middle-class family in The Lonely Villa would be much more convincing if he were presented in a ‘shot-reverse-shot’ pattern which _

would introduce the principle of biunivocal concatenation by counterposing two linked terms in a perfectly clear way: the seer/those seen. !3

The concatenation of tableaux emerging directly out of the primitive chase was generalised between 1904 and 1908!4 (from the latter year, think of Henri duc de Guise fleeing from room to room ahead of his assassins in the famous film by Le Bargy and Calmette). The great pedagogue, in this respect as in others, was

Griffith at Biograph. In film after film, he links one autarchic tableau to the next with endless exits and entrances through lateral doors, perfecting this type of match to a degree which wholly satisfies the modern eye, making these doors a demonstrative materialisation of that ‘abstract’ notion, the direction match. By contrast, the linearisation of iconic signifiers, implying the crucial identification of the spectator-subject with the camera, took a

dozen years to achieve complete realisation. It is presumably because of this discrepancy that the fact that these are two aspects of one and the same problem tends still to be ignored today, either by privileging the role of the scopic drive in the 156 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

introduction of the ‘close-up’, despite the massive overdetermina-

tion of the latter process, or by hypostasising a figure like the point-of-view shot as a specifically subjective shot, which is almost meaningless in a system in which every shot is subjective (see p.251 below).

Similar screen-notions have hidden from specialists the fact that the emergence of the alternating syntagm was also part of this process of linearisation.

I have already alluded to the existence of a threshold beyond which the syntagm of temporal succession (e.g., Another Job for the Undertaker, before-after relationship) became that of spatial succession by way of the primitive chase and the gradual introduction of the indexical signs of position, direction and eyeline

matching (which were in their turn to provide a basis for the unity of the spectator-subject, see pp.209ff. below).

Another threshold was crossed when it became possible to ‘deduce’ from the relationship of succession between two tableaux

in the time of the film (of its reading) the idea that they were diegetically simultaneous. For the alternating syntagm derives quite directly from what I have called the syntagm of succession (which in turn is based on the ‘arbitrary’ and not yet signifying juxtaposition of the autarchic tableaux of the earliest period).

The reader will not be surprised to learn that the earliest attempts to show two simultaneous actions occurring in two different places produced the co-presence of the two actions in the same tableau: in Williamson’s Are You There? (1901) a curtain end separates two protagonists talking to one another on the telephone. This type of visibly arbitrary material convention had to be replaced by a different, purely syntactic type.!> Now that contemporary stylistics allows almost any temporal relationship—flashback, ellipsis or simultaneity—to be expressed

by a mere shot change, to the exclusion of dissolves and other optical effects, the emergence of the alternating syntagm has to be seen as the foundation-stone of modern syntax. But in the histori-

cal context its main significance is that it was the moment at | which it was realised that any diegetic topography could be reduced to the linear model. Let me try to isolate the ‘morphological moment’ at which this originary fissiparity arose, 1.e., at which a distinction began to be PASSIONS AND CHASES 157

made between two meanings attributable to the transition between two biunivocally concatenated shots: in the first case, which we have already examined at length, what is signified is that the time of the second shot is linked to that of the first by a relation of posterity; in the second, that a series of shots seen repeatedly in alternation with another series implies a relationship of simultaneity with the latter. It seems fairly certain that the first standardised manifestations

of the alternating syntagm (I regard the doubtful case of Williamson’s Attack on a China Mission, see p.107 n.8, as preco-

cious and isolated, whatever the date of the lost version) are found in chase films made in France around 1905. In Les Chiens contrebandiers (see p.78 n.20) the successive stages in a chase are no longer simply shown in order, as in Rescued by Rover or Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. There is a shift from one participant to the

other, sometimes showing the dogs outwitting the customs officers, sometimes the customs officers searching for them, sometimes the smugglers on the lookout to ensure their dogs’ success. In The Cripple and the Cyclists, a modern version of the fable of

the tortoise and the hare, we are shown two runs in parallel, so we never know until the last shot which will win, the cripple in his little cart who knows the short-cuts, or the athletic but overconfident cyclist who imprudently stops at cafés en route. It was the highly linear logic of the race situation that made it

the privileged point for the development of the alternating syntagm in all its forms. Griffith, of course, became the great teacher

in this field, articulating hundreds of ‘switchbacks’ in dramatic last-minute dashes to the rescue, the most famous being those at the climaxes of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (a film whose overall structure is a variant on the alternating syntagm in which History takes the place of the chase or race). This great advance towards the linearisation of diegetic topography is less important as a specific figure—repeated alternation has become relatively rare since Griffith—than insofar as it lays the basis for the simultaneity embodied in a whole series of more

or less conventional juxtapositions which are immediately perceived as signifying ‘meanwhile’.

158 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

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It is therefore clear that important aspects of the codification process that was to culminate in the IMR—often described by previ-

ous authors as a series of discrete phenomena—were in fact different manifestations of one and the same Jinear drive.

Some readers may reckon that by insisting here on ‘vulgar’ aspects of linearity I am in some sense forestalling any analysis of

the ‘deep linearity’ of the institution, the indeed very complex relationship between the levels of the signifier and the signified that is constitutive of the transparency effect, an effect we all know today is only a trompe-l’eil, at least under the scalpel of Theory. But my investigations have convinced me that this general linearity is based, historically at least, on quite simple principles, the ones I have stated in this chapter and others I will state later. I hope for the moment that I will be granted the benefit of the doubt on this point.

NOTES 1 Iam referring to the minimum conditions of narrative as defined by the semiotics of narrative since Propp: beginning—continuation—conclusion, which can, of course, all be contained in a single shot, and are in Arroseur et arrose, for example.

2 My emphasis. I should make it clear that the main purpose of this monograph is to prove that Freeman’s The Horitz Passion Play—surely the first American production shot overseas—treally was made in Bohemia and not, as some historians have claimed, in a studio in the USA. 3 It should be emphasised that the Passion film remained an important genre until at least 1907 when the most spectacular of them all was made for Gaumont by Alice Guy and Victorin Jasset, a symbolic collaboration of one of the earliest pioneers of the primitive cinema and an innovator of the next period. 4 In the same year the British company Walturdaw produced a film called Black and White Washing including a similar exchange of complexions—in this case between races—caused by substituting shoe blacking for soap.

5 Durational editing in fact has two sides, being only a special manifestation of ellipsis. The dissolves in a desert journey (Metz’s example) constitute what I have called ‘indefinite ellipses’, major ellipses of relatively long but indeterminate duration—the fact that time has passed is designated. Here, on the PASSIONS AND CHASES 159

contrary, we have two ‘measurable ellipses’, ‘invisible’ minor ellipses only con-

notatively signifying the passing of time, as opposed to the denotative mode of the major ellipsis (see Burch 1973, pp.4-8).

6 Many French chase films are in fact a series of postcards filmed in the Lumiére manner and intended to form a series of the type ‘Parisian trades’ or ‘sights of the capital’. A Gaumont film of about 1906, Le Coup de vent, is a perfect illustration of the genre (a country bumpkin loses his hat as he leaves the railway station and his ‘trip to town’ becomes a race from tourist sight to tourist sight chasing his flying headgear). The Trusting Cabman (see p.78 n.21 above) and The Clumsy Photographer (p.67), which are not chase films, adopt the same schema. A spontaneous expression of primitive autarchy, the schema embraced all the comic genres. 7 The same ts true today. Costa-Gavras is supposed to have claimed that the use of actors very well known to French audiences in Z was intended to help spectators distinguish immediately between a plethora of characters (Alain _ Resnais in conversation at the Institut de Formation Cinématographique in 1969).

8 Of course, having analysed the film’s pictures in this way, Jacobs does not try to re-establish the ‘ideal’ linearity but instead to build a form that maintains the tension between signified and signifier (the modernist option) instead of reabsorbing it as the editing of the IMR would do. 9 Noted down in 1911, this commentary of Rodin’s also confirms the ‘universality’ of the three necessary narrative components. 10 A sorting process performed today and long since by techniques of lighting, framing, camera placement, movement and colour, all of which fuse together into a ‘natural’ centring. [1 According to Charles Musser (personal communication), a first decline in lecturing occurred in the USA after the turn of the century. The practice grew again with the nse of Hale’s Tours in 1904-5, and then declined again around 1908-9. In France, by contrast, the practice seems to have been fairly regularly maintained for the whole fairground period. 12 ‘Close-up’ or ‘medium close-up’? For my purposes here they are equivalent insofar as both isolate the faces of one or more individuals as such, detaching them decisively from the background, from any surrounding faces, and from their own bodies.

13 Of course, the first ‘keyhole’ films constituted a first linearisation in this sense as early as around 1900, but it was to be ten years and more before the mediating agent (the telescope, keyhole, etc.) which evidently located the object seen in a different space could be dispensed with. 14 The British film-maker Hepworth was perhaps the first to go beyond the chase in films based on the journey—apparently uncertain and hence suspenseful— made by a trained animal whose cleverness ensures a happy end to a dramatic situation. By making the journey the centre of the story, Hepworth was in fact demonstrating his mastery of continuity. In his company’s Rescued by Rover (directed by Lewin Fitzhamon), the story’s concatenation is articulated around the journey of a dog tracking the kidnapper of his master’s little daughter,

160 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

returning for the father, and leading him back to the house where she is being held to save her. In Black Beauty, it is a horse that goes to seek help after its master has been knocked down by tramps in a wood. 15 The shift was not made without hesitations. At Biograph in 1904 there was an attempt to show the simultaneity of two scenes by superimposing them (The Story the Biograph Told). It is not a very convincing experiment, and it is doubtful if it was often repeated.

PASSIONS AND CHASES 161

Building a Haptic Space

Some twenty years ago, a group of writers associated with the magazine Tel Que/ who were interested in the cinema as well as the plastic arts came, via a somewhat tendentious reading of Pierre Francastel, to constitute “Renaissance space’ as a bad object and the avowed surface of modernism as a good object. Marcelin Pleynet, Jean-Louis Baudry and others decreed that the

optical properties of the photographic lens (and hence the cinematic lens), a monocular technology arising directly from _ bourgeois ideology,! were a kind of ‘original sin’ of the seventh art, a historical fatality adhering to its very being and that only disruptive practices could free it from. Those who put forward these theses could appeal to the great relevance of the studies carried out in a spirit close to Marxism by Pierre Francastel and Erwin Panofsky on the social and historical dimensions of the emergence of perspective in Western painting, linked as it was to the symbolic and technological needs

of the new mercantile classes. Moreover, at the time these theories flourished in France (in Te/ Quel, Cinethique, and Cahiers

du Cinema from 1968-73), the early cinema, that of the years before 1906, was still too little known for them to have access to the essential pieces of evidence. It was not realised that for some

twenty years the cinema had followed a path which in basic respects “began again’ from the universe of primitive (or naive) art and only fully rejoined the ‘classical’ representation of space between 1910 and 1915.

It was difficult—and it still is—for the non-specialist (and it should be emphasised that it is non-specialists that we have to thank for asking these questions in the first place) to avoid reducing all early films to the Lumiére model where the representation of space is concerned. It was difficult—and it still is, all the more

so insofar as Renaissance perspective has indeed exercised a hegemony over the institutional representation of space in the 162 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

cinema for nearly three quarters of a century, a hegemony all of

us internalise as something always already there. This is, of course, an illusion: this hegemony was the fruit of more than twenty years’ work, in a sense a recapitulation of the decades of work which went into the constitution of monocular perspective In painting.

Attempting to rebut this metaphysics of original sin, JeanPatrick Lebel remarked (1971, pp.23-4) that ‘painting, in relation

to “reality”, is in fact a complete reworking. There can be no “reflection” insofar as it is the painter who reconstructs on a canvas an illusory “real”? space by organising lines and colour relations.’ But he shares the same blind spot as those he is criticising when he goes on: ‘This ... is not the case in the cinema. It is not the film-maker but the passive recording apparatus of the camera

that reproduces the object or objects filmed in the form of a reflected image constructed according to the laws of the rectilinear propagation of light rays.’ For before those laws could be inscribed in a picture that adapted to the cinema the pertinent features of the Renaissance, certain shooting conditions had to be

assembled, certain others excluded. Now, this set of choices, though everyone has internalised them today, did not arise spontaneously; it too has a history. This history has been completely

forgotten today, to the point that any return to certain primitive | practices in this respect will seem avant-garde (Godard, Akerman in Jeanne Dielman). An exploration of the surviving corpus of films from the earliest period, still so little known, and also a closer examination of

the period from 1906 to the First World War, reveals that as a whole this cinema is deeply split where the representation of space and volume is concerned. On the one hand, in fact, and especially in films deriving from the Lumiére model, one finds a perfect adaptation of the rules of perspective codified by Alberti. However, the perseverance of primitive autarchy in particular, but also the fragmentation of programmes, mean that it is impossible to talk of a hegemony of this type of picture over the early cinema.

For the material conditions of production at that time—but also the popular models that so marked early cinema, from chro-

molithographs to strip cartoons, from shadow puppets to the BUILDING A HAPTIC SPACE 163

Folies Bergére—helped induce in all the makers of composed views—in studios but also sometimes in the open air—a superb indifference to what seems to us today the three-dimensional vocation of the cinema. Years before Caligari, decades before Godard, their films demonstrate the objective capacity of the cine camera to produce a representation of space closer to that of the

| middle ages, of Epinal (or of classical Japan) than to that of the painter Millet, to cite the model deliberately chosen by Billy Bitzer.

The factors contributing to the visual ‘flatness’ of so many film tableaux before 1906—and in certain places until 1915—are five, I think:

1 a more or less vertical illumination suffusing the whole field in front of the lens with a completely even light; 2 the fixity of the camera; 3 its horizontal and frontal placement; 4 the very widespread use of painted backdrops;

5 lastly, the placing of the actors, always a long way from the camera, often spread out in a tableau vivant, all facing front, and without axial movement of any kind.

Thousands of films produced during the period I am referring to might serve to illustrate this important tendency and its objec-

tive resistance to illusionistic perspective, but the q@uvre of Georges Méliés undoubtedly provides the clearest model; he was not only principally responsible for the development of this ten-

dency, but, in an article published by his close friend Maurice Noverre (1930) and presumed to reflect his ideas, actually outlined its theory:

What is there to say about contemporary views, in which the lens is supposedly following characters from real life and pho-

tographing them unawares? ..... What is there to say, too, about sets that move horizontally or from top to bottom allowing different parts of a room to be seen, characters who suddenly grow larger or whose hands and feet become enor-

mous so a detail can be made visible? We shall be told, of course, that that 1s modern technique! But is it the right technique? That is the question: is it natural? 164 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

It is clear that for Méliés, a living fossil from the primitive period 25 years later, what is ‘natural’ is still the externality of the spectator-subject. He perceives a tracking shot as a movement

not of the spectator’s point of view but in the pro-filmic field, a close-up as an increase in the size of something in that field. In 1930, as a spectator, Meéliés still saw himself as sitting in a fixed

position in front of a flat screen, which was indeed the mental — position of his audiences 25 years earlier. And as much as the

exhaustion of a certain style it was the fundamental challenge to | this imaginary placement represented by American and Danish

films that drove Méliés into bankruptcy in 1912. |

L’Homme a la téte en caoutchouc (“The Man with the Rubber Head’), made in 1901-2 when Meliés was at the height of his suc-

cess and creativity, can be seen as a practical demonstration of this theorem. It is a film with a single trick described as follows by Georges Sadoul (1973, t.II, p.61): ‘A chemist [Meliés himself]

in his laboratory places his own head on a table. Attaching to it a rubber tube connected with a giant pair of bellows, he begins to pump the latter as hard as he can. Thereupon his head begins to swell until it becomes truly colossal....2 Sadoul gives this account of the trick mechanism: ‘The head swells against the black back-

ground produced by a wide-open door. On this reserve was superimposed a view of Méliés’s head shot with the camera tracking in and out.’ In fact it was Meéliés, seated on a rolling trolley,

who moved closer to the camera on an inclined plane, but what matters to me here is that the camera set-up prevents the movement in depth being perceived as such, it appears on the screen as a two-dimensional movement only, as an enlargement or shrinking of the head.

It is enough to inspect any collection of stills from Méliés’s films in their black-and-white versions (a historically important |

facet of his work irrespective of the question of tinting, see pp.171ff. below), or to view a reasonably large body of the films to have ample evidence of the fact that for Meliés the perceptual

flatness of the picture on the screen was the only cinematic | ‘truth’. Although he used ‘close-ups’ in his films much more than is often realised, they always signify ‘large size’, as in L7Homme a la téte en caoutchouc. He only recognises one possible shot scale,

that of the ‘proscenium’ long shot. It is undeniable that this BUILDING A HAPTIC SPACE 165

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Fig. 22. Histoire dun crime. This tableau showing the murder is an example of the influence of the illustrated tabloid front-page (e.g. Le Petit Parisien) On French films at the turn of the century. The tableau of the prisoner's dream 1s a Curious early use of the ‘balloon’ technique to show the alcoholic antecedents of the crime. (The British would soon abandon

this construction of the insert as a set in favour of a double-exposure technique cl. What the Curate Really Did.) A PRIMITIVE MODE OF REPRESENTATION? 187

implicated in the primitive system, a fact which often makes them

seductive monsters, seductive, that is, when viewed from the standpoint of the institutional normality yet to be achieved, our normality.

What then constitutes this Primitive Mode of Representation? | have discussed some of its main features at length: autarchy of the tableau (even after the introduction of the syntagm of succession), horizontal and frontal camera placement, maintenance of

long shot? and ‘centrifugality’. These are features that can be detected in the text of a typical film, and they, the ambience of the theatres and the possible presence of a lecturer interact to produce what I have tried to define as the experience of primitive externality.

But there is another characteristic of the primitive film—really a whole cluster of characteristics—which I have hardly touched on as yet, although it will help us to understand an aspect of the

IMR which has been so completely internalised that it is now

very difficult to approach it directly. This is what I shall call the | non-closure of the PMR (in contrast, in other words, to the closure of the IMR).

But I should make it clear that while this feature is found in various forms in a large number of films, many others, especially after 1900, already present a formal semblance of institutional closure. Hence insofar as this feature can be registered in certain films as narrative non-closure (in the sense defined below), it is

not constitutive of the PMR in general. But if institutional closure is taken to be more than narrative self-sufficiency and a certain way of bringing the narrative to an end, if, on the contrary, it is treated as the sum of all the signifying systems that centre the subject and lay the basis for a full diegetic effect, including

even the context of projection, then the primitive cinema is indeed non-closed as a whole. However, the most acute manifestations of this non-closure do concern the narrative, its structure and its status.

Is the potential or actual presence of a lecturer alongside the primitive screen> the only explanation for the existence of films

like Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Slavery Days (1903), a fifteen-minute, twenty-tableaux digest of a bulky novel? In any case, the extraordinary ellipses implied by such a procedure are 188 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

hardly filled by the captions to the different tableaux (‘Eliza’s Escape Across the River on the Floating Ice’, ‘Eva and Tom in the Garden’). It is as if story and characters were assumed to be familiar to the audience, or this knowledge was to be provided for them during the projection. Initiated with the Passion films, this setting aside of the narrative instance, this tacit affirmation that the narrative discourse is

located outside the picture—in the spectator’s mind or the lecturer’s mouth—was to inform the cinema for twenty years and | more. Vitagraph’s early ‘art films’ (e.g., Francesca da Rimini, 1907, Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy, 1910, and the Vitagraph ver-

sion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1910) still appealed to an external narrative instance. It is so self-evident today that a film must tell its own story* that we are often unable to read such narratives. To our eyes, L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, for example, is incom-

plete as a film without some knowledge of History, whereas Intolerance, eight years later, is ‘self-sufficient’. | From the simple headings they started as, insert titles began to change around 1905 into summaries of the action preceding each tableau. But this did not make any basic difference; the externality of the narrative was now simply inscribed into the film. When in 1905 Bitzer made The Kentucky Feud, based on a celebrated feud between two subsequently famous families, the Hatfields and

the McCoys,° he introduced each tableau with a long intertitle

summarising in dry telegraphese all the bloody peripeteia of the | shot that follows (Home of the McCoys. The Auction. Buddy : McCoy shoots at Jim Hatfield and kills Hatfield’s mother’). Such intertitles, systematically anticipating the narrative content of the following shot and thus eliminating any possible suspense, were to constitute a major obstacle to the linearisation of narrative for a further ten years at least, and their traces can be detected right

through the 1920’s, though with connotations that were ironic (Sennett), cultural (Gance), or distancing (Vertov). There was clearly no discontinuity between this use of the intertitle and the lecturer’s commentary. One more example of a ‘step forward’

that brought with it a retreat (until around 1914). One more example, too, of a primitive feature that was to be successfully integrated into ‘cultural’ cinema.

I should add that this externality of the narrative instance in A PRIMITIVE MODE OF REPRESENTATION? 189

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“ i “ —_ ~

THE MOTIONLESS VOYAGE 203 ™“

was in fact to take more than fifteen years to centre the spectator-subject.

This film—like the famous movable shot of the outlaw firing on the audience in The Great Train Robbery three years later—is of course banking on the ‘hallucinatory’ effect the cinema produced in the very earliest period. Think of the spectators in the Salon Indien who, tradition claims, leapt up from their tables in

terror at the train rushing towards them. But whereas for Lumieére the hallucinatory effect was more or less accidental, an involuntary consequence of his ‘scientistic’ approach, for Hep-

worth and Porter it had become an intentional interpellation of the spectator, an explicit invitation to the voyage. Another film of Porter’s, made at the very end of 1902, reveals most clearly the external position occupied mentally by the primitive film spectator, a position which has become almost impossi-

ble for us even to conceive of today, except when our institutional expectations are radically frustrated by some strategy of the modernist cinema. Moreover, the historiography of Life of an American Fireman is in itself a fine demonstration of the watertight barrier between the institutional experience and what was possible in pre-1906 cinema.

After a first section showing in particular the up-to-date appointments of a fire station’—mostly actuality shots enlisted in the story by chase-type editing—the more important part of the

film shows the firemen fighting a fire in a frame house. This second part consists of three set-ups, two exteriors, the third a studio interior. The first exterior shows the firemen arriving. Then Porter shot an interior and another exterior, each showing more

or less the same action: In a first-floor room a woman and her small child are trapped by the flames. The woman at the window

cries desperately for help, then faints on the bed. A fireman comes into the room, gets her through the window and down the

ladder. Returning to the smoke-filled room he saves the child, then with a colleague he returns once again to the room to put out the fire, while in the street others are busy reviving the victims.

The film was long thought to be lost. But thanks to some stills and the ‘script’ given in an Edison catalogue, it was known that this film of Porter’s evinced a precocious aspiration to camera

204 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS |

ubiquity, to ‘modern editing’. According to Lewis Jacobs (1939,

p.41), for example, this section of the film was ‘one of the earliest | signs of a realisation that a scene need not be taken in one shot but can be built up by a number of shots. It was not until ten years later, however, that the shot as a single element in a scene of many elements was to be fully understood and used by film-

makers.’ |

In the 1940’s a copy of the film was at last rediscovered. And it seemed to confirm the ‘evidence’ of the Edison catalogue, that the film was an amazingly precocious example of cross-cutting, with the action of the mother and child being saved fragmented into a

dozen shots, alternating exterior and interior. As late as 1980, this version was still distributed by the Museum of Modern Art.

Today, however, it is clear that, at some point in its history, some unknown distributor had felt the need to tamper with a film whose syntax was no longer acceptable. For in the original film, as copyrighted with the Library of Congress, the three tableaux were presented as follows: A pan follows a fire engine as it stops in front of a house from which smoke is pouring. Then follows the studio shot and all the action described above occurs once. Finally there is the longer shot of the same exterior in which all the action is seen over again.

Given the absolute hegemony of institutional structures by the end of the First World War, the unknown distributor had taken it upon himself to treat these shots as if they were rushes awaiting editing, needing to be fragmented into a multiplicity of shots

capable of achieving the biunivocal concatenation that had become the only mode of temporal relation anyone could conceive in the cinema. The result was to articulate this scene into a perfect linear alternation such as Porter could never even have imagined in his day—but such as to make him seem a unique visionary.

A few years ago, American scholars found a distribution copy of the film in Maine, and it confirmed what all consistent historians had suspected for twenty years:? that 1903 audiences (who, according to Jacobs again, gave this film an enthusiastic recep-

tion) had indeed seen it in a version in which the two shots appeared integrally and the action was all repeated. In 1902, no

one would yet venture ubiquitous editing, they preferred to rest | THE MOTIONLESS VOYAGE 205

content with a syntax which fundamentally contradicted the principle of temporal linearity even though this principle was strongly affirmed by the first section of the film, which adopted the codes of the chase.4

In a sense the whole thrust of this book® is to bring out the decisive gulf dividing a period in the cinema’s history in which

institutional oneness and continuity in all their aspects ‘go

without saying’—though by means. of highly artificial constructions—from another in which what went without saying for both film-makers and audiences was an awareness that one was sitting in a theatre watching pictures unfold on a screen in front of one. Porter, presumably in accord with the other people responsible for Edison productions, could not go ‘beyond’ this already in fact premonitory gesture, could not attempt the editing that could be so successfully achieved a decade or so later with the footage he shot in 1902, precisely because at the time an external relation to moving pictures still prevailed over a representation of time as linear. The film’s enunciation can be translated as follows: ‘Here is a scene shown from one viewpoint; now here it is seen from another.’® It thus reveals its roots in primitive autarchy (whose

persistent survival in the chase film that was developed in the same period I have already pointed out). Here that autarchy still easily prevails over any impulse towards linearisation. Once one has noted how hard it was for Fritz Lang in Metropolis twenty

years later and Julien Duvivier in La Belle equipe thirty years later to master the codes of spatial direction, one realises how

deeply rooted that autarchy really was. | This film is perhaps the most spectacular example of this type of duplication signifying simultaneity, but it is entirely consistent with a film-making tradition often exemplified by Porter himself, but also by Meliés.

The beautiful film Voyage a travers Pimpossible contains two

pairs of shots supposed to be adjacent to one another in diegetic space and to succeed one another in diegetic time, but in both cases they are ‘cut off from one another by the principle of primitive autarchy. Georges Sadoul (1973, t.II, p.402) describes one example of this phenomenon and offers a commentary:

206 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

| 1 Exterior of the Righi Inn. The automabouloff crashes through the front and disappears inside. ’

2 Interior of the Inn. Travellers are peacefully dining. The wall collapses. The automabouloff drives along the dining table.

Once again we have ... a style proper to the theatre, governed

by changing sets. In the heat of the action the director is obliged to go back. He shows the beginning of an event the end of which we have already seen in a preceding tableau.

Sadoul goes on to contrast this ‘blindness’ of the Reactionary Meliés with Porter’s method (modern shot-reverse-shot). In 1948, when this passage was published, Sadoul too believed that in Life of an American Fireman Porter had already mastered ubiquitous

editing by 1902. | The passage is also characteristic of its time in automatically attributing the origins of this overlapping to the theatre in general. The external position that the overlap perpetuates is less that of the ‘theatre’-—1.e., a certain architectural combination of stage and auditorium, even if this syntax is a kind of mechanical translation of it—than that of the caf’conc’, the music-hall, the circus, the American vaudeville and all the forms of popular spec-

tacle still in existence at the turn of the century and eventually more or less killed off by the cinema. For the bourgeois theatre, with its stage a l’italienne, its darkened house, its rapt, disciplined audience, already implied a centring, a ubiquity, a closure of its own.

There are many other examples of this kind of temporal overlap in films by Porter and his contemporaries (How They Do Things on the Bowery, Off His Beat, Next!). In all these cases, the temporal overlap is combined with an interior-exterior relation, more or less prefiguring the 180-degree match which was not to be generally mastered until the 1920’s. By contrast, the editing figure adumbrated in the wish to have the automabouloff go through the wall of the Righi Inn was the very first classical figure to enter standard vocabulary. This is the figure I call the contiguity syntagm. I shall return to these two critical thresholds

below. |

THE MOTIONLESS VOYAGE 207

Thus today we read in primitive films an effect of distance that seems inherent in their system. But we can only read this distance

from where we are, within the Institution (but also, of course, from an experience of avant-garde practices explicitly directed

against the Institution). This externality, this sense of noninvolvement arises from a deficiency we feel as such. But did spectators feel any such thing at the time? Or did they establish the same relation with the minute characters, the action and the narrative of The Great Train Robbery, say, as a 1924 audience

did with the diegesis of a film like The Iron Horse, or we do today with some James Bond film?® This is hard to believe. Most important, were they satisfied with the presumably distanced rela-

tions they had with films or, on the contrary, did they feel frustrated, as Maxim Gorky had with the Lumiére Cinématographe? We have no sure way of telling.

However we interpret the internal evidence offered by the films _ themselves—and the evidence a contrario provided by the rise of the IMR—1it should never be forgotten that the preconditions of this externality were also inscribed in the conditions in which these

films were exhibited. Whether fairground booths in France or Wales, or nickelodeons in America, the places in which early films were presented were smoke-filled and noisy.? People came

and went almost non-stop in the nickelodeons, and the fairground booths were hardly soundproofed at all. And in both venues a more or less gifted lecturer might retail a more or less facetious patter. The picture palaces of the 1920’s, muffled, dark and isolating, with huge organs and usherettes to help ‘discipline’

the popular sections of the audience—and the children—were qualitatively more conducive to the ‘voyage’. 3K 2k fe ok 2 ok OK 2 oc .

Ignoring the major ellipses of ‘indefinite scope’ that articulated filmed boxing matches and Passion plays, the first editing figures to be generalised, though unevenly, were the axial match and

direction match or, more generally, contiguity syntagm, already | discussed. 208 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

The contribution made by the axial match to the centring of the spectator, our primary concern here, seems to be of the same nature as that of all the other figures of ubiquity. As it also happens to be the simplest of them in form, especially given the exceptional persistence of frontality, it historically preceded all the other direct matches. It has remained the same until today, only developing to the extent that it has been allowed to combine more and more discrepant shot scales as dramaturgy and stylistics have progressed.

The contiguity syntagm has a richer development: we have traced its emergence in the chase film, its change into a direction match with Hepworth’s animals, then Griffith’s communicating

doors. The culmination of a process I believe to have been a homogeneous one was its transformation into shot-reverse-shot, as a mastery of eyeline directions was achieved equivalent to that of the directions of the movement of bodies and vehicles. This all constitutes a single privileged lineage. For the direction

match brought with it the first explicit consideration of the

psycho-physiological orientation of the spectator. |

As is well known, the basic principle underlying the whole series of orientation matches (of direction, eyeline and position) is a rigorous respect within a certain syntactic unit on the screen for

the spectator’s left-right orientation. The semiotic status of this principle which I long found fairly perplexing seems to me today to be describable in terms of Peirce’s categories.!9 In fact we are here dealing with a signification system which is enormously vari-

, able in its substances of expression, but is manifestly indexical if we consider the ‘existential’ relation (in Peirce’s sense) between this system and the left-right ‘binarism’ of the spectator’s own body. This homology between directions on the surface of the screen—occasionally contradicting those of pro-filmic space (see

p.211 below)—and those of the spectator-subject was the starting-point for the cinema’s centring of the spectator by making him or her the reference point ‘around which’ was constituted the oneness and continuity of a spectacle destined to become more and more fragmented. !!

The French makers of chase films seem to have been aware of a rule for entrances and exits, in other words of direction matching, from very early on. Like Cecil Hepworth and Lewin FitzTHE MOTIONLESS VOYAGE 209

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hamon in Rescued by Rover they managed to produce the sense of a continuous and consistent trajectory by repeating movements towards the camera to signify ‘outward journey’ and movements away from the camera to signify ‘return journey’. But Griffith was one of the very first film-makers to have been aware of the ‘illusionistic’ nature of the direction match and the need to use it even against the logic of profilmic topography. This distinction lies | at the heart of the whole practology of the IMR. In The Lonely Villa—made at the end of April and the beginning of May 1909, i.e., less than a year after The Adventures of Dolly—we twice see the following sequence: long shot with the villa in the distance and to left of frame with the three ne’er-do- |

wells in the foreground also to the left making ready for their crime (to get the paterfamilias called away so that the mother and children will be at their mercy). On the first occasion, when one of them, having disguised himself as a tramp to deliver a bogus telegram, goes towards the house, he exits frame right!? to

enter frame left in the next shot which shows the villa’s porch and steps from closer to. The same sequence occurs a second time to bring the whole trio to the villa door. In both cases the rule ts (already) respected: the character(s) exit(s) right and enter(s) left. And yet the slightest examination of the topography presented in

the first of the two shots shows that the entrance on the left is | totally aberrant: in the first shot the camera is manifestly placed far ‘to the right’ of the villa (in the pro-filmic space, assuming we

are facing the front of the house), so an entrance on the left in the second shot is unlikely, to say the least. The bogus tramp and

then the whole trio would have had to make a weird detour to approach the steps from the left, all the weirder in the second case insofar as the path they would have to have taken passes in front of the villa whereas the criminals are supposed to be trying to keep hidden. The fact that in 1909 Griffith chose a pro-filmically ‘false’ solution to achieve a correct match shows a remarkable insight into the nature of the historical strategy of the integration-centring of the spectator. However, an awareness that eyeline ‘sutures’ work in the same way took a lot longer to develop. In his famous 1911

film The Lonedale Operator, Griffith does manage one correct | eyeline match. The girl waves goodbye to her boyfriend who THE MOTIONLESS VOYAGE 211

responds in a second shot in what is an early form of shotreverse-shot. But a few minutes later, when the girl and the villains are supposed to see each other through the station window, there is a crude mismatch. For the early Griffith, room equals tableau, which links his cinema to the primitive universe until at least 1913. Communicating doors having enabled him to achieve a perfectly rigorous continuity from room to room,!? he was able

to extend this articulation to the exterior, too, so long as the guarantee was always the movement on foot of a human body.!4 In The Lonedale Operator again, the mismatched directions of the train (in the closer shots the driver looks off left whereas in the long shots the train is travelling right) show that with this type of mechanical motion as with eyelines, there was as yet no question of matching for Griffith. Could this be because, the basis of the

left-right relationship being the spectator’s body (i.e., the director’s body), it was more directly translatable into the body of an actor or an actress?

Without pretending to trace these subtle and _ diversified developments (the Danes were possibly ahead of Griffith in this

respect, too), it can be postulated that the next stage on the semantic level was represented by a film like The Cheat (1915). Here the main set (Sessue Hayakawa’s ‘oriental’ salon) is fragmented laterally by the cutting: when Fannie Ward faints at the news of her ruin, for example, Hayakawa drags her off screen (right) and reappears in another shot (entering left) without hav-

ing left the room. Even in moving from one room to another, characters are rarely seen going through doors: simply leaving the frame has become the pivot of topographic articulation. !>

But the very earliest articulating figures—direction matches, eyeline matches (and of course axial matches)—first developed under the egis of frontality. In the films of DeMille, Barker and

Ralph Ince, the eyeline directions in the few reverse shots attempted from around 1913 are still a long way from the lens axis; similarly, entrances and exits close to the camera are almost unknown. And, most important, the camera stayed constantly ‘in

front’ of the action, contemplating it always from one and the same side. Only very gradually did the actors’ looks get close to the lens axis or the camera ‘insinuate itself? between interlocutors,

positing the portions of space containing them as set against one 212 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

another, and eventually, around the mid 1920’s, leading to the

topographic encirclement of the spectator-subject. , But before carrying forward my examination of this development, I should return once again to the ‘origins’ and take up the story of a certain exchange of looks.

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On the one hand there is the look towards camera (or rather two

looks of this kind: one that sees the camera and one that does | not). On the other hand there is the look of the spectator constituted as a voyeur.

Well before the full IMR implicitly constituted the spectator as

a voyeur, the primitive cinema in its first hesitant steps did so explicitly. Indeed, one of the first archetypes of cinematic narra-

tive, appearing at the same time as the Passion film and well before the chase film, was the film of voyeurism in the strongest sense: a woman undresses under the gaze of a man (normally concealed from the woman, if only by a convention of the “Bride Retires’ kind).

In 1896, the collaboration of three men, the photographer Pirou as producer, the cameraman Joly, a refugee from Pathe, and one of Pirou’s employees, Kirchner alias Lear, who directed,

resulted in the appearance on Parisian screens of the very first version of Le Coucher de la mariee (‘The Bride Retires’), with such success that two other projection points had to be opened to satisfy the demand. How many versions of this scene were to be produced, mostly copied from this ‘master stroke’, right up until about 1905? I can-

not say, and unfortunately an examination of the producing firms’ catalogues is unreliable given the fact that the film’s count-

less remakes either have the same title as the original or one of the three or four substitute titles invented for it. I have personally seen about ten films on the subject.

This inscription of the man’s gaze as a gaze-that-stages is so obviously crucial for the future of the Institution that I need hardly insist on it. The American scholar Lucy Fischer has THE MOTIONLESS VOYAGE 213

already demonstrated in her excellent article ‘The Lady Vanishes’ | (1979) that, before 1900, especially in Meéliés’s films, it was the | male magician who could make the woman’s body he gazed at. vanish at will. The primitive cinema often said out loud what the IMR would contrive to say sotto voce.

Note also that in many of the versions of Le Coucher de la mariee, the bride looks into the lens of the camera filming her as

if to summon the spectators to bear witness, like the stage stripper; occasionally the voyeur-‘husband’ also appeals via the

lens to his ‘brothers’ watching him.!® | Are these winks and nods historically the earliest kind of deliberate look at the camera, as opposed to the accidental glances of the Lyon Congress delegates at Lumiére’s camera?!’ —

At any rate, these looks derive from the popular theatre, be it | the variety stage with its direct address, or melodrama and farce

with their as it were parenthetic address. Such procedures, outlawed by the naturalistic codes then in force in bourgeois drama, relegated to the boulevard comedy and the operetta, were

already, as we have seen (p.83 above), the béte noire of the managers of British music-halls, anxious for a better policed audience.

The cinematic aside was by no means restricted to striptease _ films, it was a standard practice throughout the primitive period until 1915 at least in France (Feuillade’s Les Vampires)!® whereas the Selig Polyscope Company was to prohibit it officially in 1909

in the USA (see below). Moreover, the note it published on this occasion suggests also that actors had the bad habit of looking towards the camera for suggestions or encouragement from the director. In addition, in the absence of paid extras—or assistants to marshall them—the unpaid ‘extras’ in early street scenes often look at the camera, like the Lyon Congress delegates. It 1s thus hardly surprising that looks into the lens remained very common

for fifteen years. | Around 1908, however, it began to be realised that in the nas-

cent new conception these looks into the lens had a quite different effect from that of glances at the audience from a theatrical stage. For a living actor who turns his gaze on an audience © with whom he is really co-present addresses a collectivity which

submerges each individual into what is both a solidarity and a 214 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

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Fig. 30: A Drunkard’s Reformation (Griffith, 1909).

THE MOTIONLESS VOYAGE 219

which for him is one of his own story. In Rosalie et Léontine vont au theatre (1911), the main action consists of showing frag- —

ments of some kind of melodrama taking place on the stage of a | theatre and the outrageous and mirth-provoking reactions of two women seated in the balcony. But such experiments only had a limited effect; only a particular case was resolved here. By contrast, at the very beginning of the century a film-maker from the ‘Brighton school’ had posed this relationship between spectator’s look and actor’s look in far

more complex and probably more conscious terms: | ‘T won’t! I won’t! Pll eat the camera first.’ Gentleman read- — ing,-* finds a camera fiend with his head under a cloth, focussing him up. He orders him off, approaching nearer and nearer, gesticulating and ordering the photographer off, until his head — fills the picture, and finally his mouth only occupies the screen. He opens it, and first the camera, then the operator disappears inside. He retires munching him up and expressing his great satisfaction.

What this catalogue summary of The Big Swallow (Anon. 1903a, p.115; cit. Low & Manvell 1948, p.75), presumably written

by Williamson himself, does not tell us, however, is that when this ‘gentleman’ gets near the camera, his look and hence his ges-

ticulations seem to be addressed to someone at least thirty _ degrees away from the camera. The modern spectator even finds

it quite difficult to grasp that this look is directed at the ‘camerafiend’, who, we are told, has his head under a black cloth, | so that his look coincides with that of the camera. However, after | the mouth has ‘swallowed’ camera and cameraman—by a childish

trick: against a ‘matched’ black background they fall over an ‘invisible parapet’—the swallower retreats looking straight into the lens.

Is this not a kind of presentiment of the critical distinction the Institution was to sanction between 1910 and 1920, 1.e., that a look into the lens implies the disappearance of the camera—as Facing Page: Fig. 3/: The Big Swallow (Williamson, 1901).

220. LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

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cess on US commercial television is the constant interruption

through commercials, a kind of pro-filmic pendant of the plethora of apparently accepted live interruptions peculiar to the ‘average’ North American household’s relation to their TV set.

(It is extremely rare, for example, that callers will be asked to 262 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

ring back, even if the person receiving the call is watching TV: ‘it

isn’t that important’.) And there is good reason to believe that the sluggish pace and pedantic repetitiveness of the day-time soaps is designed to mesh with the rhythm of housework.

In contradistinction to this experience of chopped-up audiovisual discourse one is tempted to feel that the uninterrupted duration of diegetic production over a period of an hour or more might well be an essential element in that maximisation of the diegetic effect which we associate with the classical film—and with European public television. Perhaps this too is the crucial importance of the shift in programme format between 1908 and 1914, from a series of six-to-ten-minute shorts with songs or lantern slides between each, to one centred around a film well over an hour long. The ‘cool’, disjunctive format of United States television may be seen as a veritable turning back of the clock, which is anything but innocent. Audio-visual expression returns to a quasi pre-discursive state, in which pure sensation overwhelms meaning.

It has abandoned the absorbing presence of the full diegetic process—which after all did elicit some kind of mental involvement, the motionless voyage cannot be made all alone—in favour of a sort of bland detachment (clinically observed to be close to a state of narcosis or hypnosis—see Mander 1978, pp.192-215). The repression in El Salvador is no more or less ‘involving’ than The Price is Right, and even the most outspoken (fictional) denunciation of, say, migrant workers’ camps in Florida, will be taken with the same mixture of cynicism and incredulity as the parapsychological exploits of That’s Incredible! I suggest that any European reader still inclined to equate the strongly diegetic film with ‘manipulation’ take a look at the manipulation that is going on across the Atlantic on an unprecedented scale and to which the key is precisely a certain undercutting of the classical diegetic effect whose genealogy has been the major subject of this book.

NARRATIVE, DIEGESIS 263

NOTES {1 General within its main sphere of relevance: the mass audience of developed Western nations—although even in our cities a Black audience will tend to turn a Harlem-style kung fu movie into an ‘epic’ ceremony, and children will do the same to almost any film. And then there is the strange cult of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Still, the experience I refer to, an experience which is observable for a James Bond film in the West End or a screening at

the National Film Theatre, remains by far the majority experience in the industrialised West.

2 The earliest film I know which seems to display a complete mastery of the institutional découpage is Maurice Tourneur’s A Girl’s Folly (1917) in which the principle of camera ubiquity (in the film-studio sequence) is displayed with

a skill still absent from such milestones as Barker/Ince’s The Italian or DeMille’s The Cheat (both of 1915). Whatever the case, it is during these crucial years that the decisive threshold is crossed.

3 Roland Barthes speaks of the apparent fusion between the connotative and denotative levels in the still photograph. In the talking cinema the (con)fusion between these two levels is far more complete, not only because of the syntag-

matic extension (in time) of the denotative level but also because of the material integration at the iconic level of the specifying text, the Word, which, with the photograph, is always writing, 1.c., symbolic, non-analogical (the system of the silent cinema is much closer to the advertising poster than to that of the talkies). 4 ‘Robertson, a physicist and illusionist, had, during the Revolution, drawn all Paris to his presentations of fantasmagories ... produced by means of a Fantascope, a lantern mounted on wheels and able to move silently on rails ....

Sounds of rain, thunder and funeral bells accompanied these apparitions. Occasionally a lightning-streaked sky was glimpsed; a point of light emerged and grew, and enormous phantoms seemed to approach from the distance, rush up to the spectators, and vanish just as they were about to reach them’ (Sadoul 1973, t.1, p.226).

5S Maxim Gorky, so prompt to denounce the lack of presence that detracted from the Lumiére films as far as he was concerned, elsewhere revealed a precocious insight into the ideological implications of institutional voyeurism. At the beginning of his fine novel The Spy (published in 1908), he attributes a significant fantasy to his young anti-hero, soon to be enrolled as a Tsarist police spy: “There were many other good things about the church. Besides the quiet and tender twilight, Yevsey liked the singing. When he sang without notes, he closed his eyes firmly, and letting his clear, plaintive soprano blend with the general chorus in order that it should not be heard above the others, he hid himself deliciously somewhere, as if overcome by a sweet sleep. In this drowsy state it seemed to him that he was drifting away from life, approach-

ing another gentle, peaceful existence. A thought took shape in his mind, which he once expressed to his uncle in these words: “Can a person live so that he can go everywhere and see everything, but be seen by nobody?” 264 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

“Invisibly?” asked the blacksmith and thought a while. “I should suppose it would be impossible’”’ (1908, pp.5-6).

6 True, neither of these films was a box-office success, which might argue against the idea that the transgression that characterises Lady in the Lake has any privileged status. But the analyses provided here encourage me to think, considering the generally recognised mediocrity of The Thief (and the commercial failure of nearly all the ‘counter-subversive’ films of the McCarthy era), given the intellectualism and homosexual undertones of Rope, that there is indeed a qualitative difference between the reasons for their failures and that of a film otherwise as honourably conventional as Lady in the Lake. 7 By contrast, the decentring procedures used by Paulino Viota in Contactos (1970)—scenes taking place ‘too far away’ from the camera or in off-screen space—provide an example of a deliberate destabilisation of the ‘primal process’.

8 I am convinced that the ultimate rationale behind the elimination (or nearelimination) of titles from such films as Hintertreppe, Der letzte Mann (‘The

Last Laugh’), The Wind or Menilmontant was indeed the heightening of diegetic homogeneity and hence of characterisation and narrative presence. By

contrast, a genuinely speechless, silent and also titleless film lke Philippe Garrel’s Le Revélateur was indeed such a ‘throwback’, but with modernist Intentions.

9 Characters are the centre of the diegetic and narrative worlds, as well as the privileged link between them. No doubt it is they that most effectively mask the relative autonomy of these two levels. It may be objected that there are audiences which have different expectations when they watch films by Michael _ Snow, which is obviously true. It 1s also obviously true that it is statistically most unlikely that someone lacking the socio-cultural formation permitting

him or her such ‘alternative’ expectations will attend such a screening, although it is true that on certain American campuses today this has become more possible. But I would claim that even for avant-garde aficionados— those of them that go to the cinema from time to time or watched television until they were fifteen (i.c., almost everyone in industrialised societies)—the expectation here that someone will enter the stage is inscribed in their awareness as non-marked, whereas the persistence of this empty frame beyond a ‘reasonable’ length of time is marked. And the fact that after three or four minutes the film does satisfy this expectation can only reinforce the marked quality of that emptiness. 10 Is either of these elements alone enough today? Le Revelateur—but also the experience of silent films with musical accompaniment—would seem to suggest that the answer is no for movement, but a limit case like Ken Jacobs’s film Blonde Cobra might imply that it is yes for sound alone. When the storyteller Jack Smith’s face gives way to a black screen but we continue to hear his voice, our expectation of the return of the picture gives this sound a presence quite unlike that of a voice on the radio, closer to the situation of a picture breakdown on television.

NARRATIVE, DIEGESIS 265

{1 Of course, television in itself permits a ‘divided attention’, and this is no longer found only in the USA. But certain safeguards—restricted viewing periods, a rejection of constant interruptions from advertisements, and espe-

| cially the cultural vocation of state television networks—continue to maintain a strong connection between the diegetic production of European television and that of cinema. {2 The actor who played a doctor in a very popular serial received more than a

quarter of a million letters in one year, most of them requesting medical advice (see Mander 1978, p.255). 13. There is a more sophisticated example of the same kind of thing at the beginning of Alien.

14 I find it very significant that ‘cinéma-verite’ codes, so present in American fiction films in the jate 1960’s and early 1970’s, have almost entirely disappeared from US cinema screens as well as TV (a ‘discussion’ on American television, political or otherwise, is about as spontaneous as a sit-com), so that even their most consistent proponent, John Cassavetes, was forced to abandon them almost completely in Gloria.

266 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

Conclusion

I have left a number of blank spaces in the picture, consciously if not exactly voluntarily. There are, I think, three of them. I have noted in passing that some parameters—shot-reverseshot in particular—took much longer to become generalised than

others—the axial match, for example. But I have not ventured any interpretation of this phenomenon. I have devoted pages to the claim that there was nothing natural about the route taken by the constitution of the IMR, and yet I have only examined its socio-economic and socio-ideological determinations, ignoring the role of the symbolic system presiding over psychical formation in the West (the CEdipal instance, etc.). Finally, I have located character at the centre of diegesis, I have even made it the

relay between diegesis and narrativity, but I have offered no theory of the formation of the institutional persona equivalent to those of the centring of the subject, the constitution of a haptic space, etc. The reason is that all these questions relate to disciplines in which I do not feel myself to be competent. However, here are a few pointers. The constitution of the persona is in part subsumed under the narrative instance, of course. Elsewhere (1979, pp.64-5), I have outlined what I believe to be the narrative model of the central character, the object of narrative identification, locatable insofar

as he or she is endowed with contradictions and as there is a galaxy of characters whose ‘distance from the centre’ is defined by their degree of stereotypicality revolving around and thereby defining him or her.

But it is clear that there are other dimensions to the constitution of the persona. Historically, it is linked to the development of the insert close-up and of the star system, and the transition to the latter is linked to the move from the artisanal to the industrial stage. When, even before the generalisation of the close-up, the studios began to receive mail addressed to certain characters CONCLUSION 267

in certain films, the producers concealed it from the actors they | still employed on an ‘egalitarian and anonymous’ basis. Only once the massification of the American audience was envisaged did the star system begin to emerge with the rise of the Vitagraph

Girl and the Biograph Girl, something which happened well

before credit titles appeared. | As for the deeper symbolism of the star system, it is surely a subtle extension of the Frankensteinian ideology of the exorcism of death (the film character dies—if only because the film ends— but the star will be reborn in the next film). This helped to take the edge off the traumatism of the Institutional ending and make it ultimately acceptable. Perhaps that is why the death of a star while still young, 1.e., still a star (Valentino, Dean, Monroe) is experienced as such a great tragedy. !

As for the order in which the achievements I have analysed

were made, I have to admit that the only insight that has occurred to me is based on studies often rejected on principle by modern Freudianism and as unscientific by some psychologists.

Nevertheless, the observations reported by Piaget and Inhelder that I find illuminating here do seem to be relatively well established.? In their book The Child’s Conception of Space (1956),° the two Swiss scientists propose a model of the child’s perceptual

development: in a first stage the child can only conceive of its environment in a ‘frontal’ way; it takes several years of training before it can imagine any but its own immediate viewpoint.* Now we have seen that the axial match is the first change of viewpoint ‘discovered’ by film-makers, whereas the 90-degree cut is one of the last, becoming common even later than shot-reverse-shot. It.

would be rash to derive from this fact the hypothesis that the ‘phylogeny’ of cinematic representation recapitulated the ontogeny of human perception, and much more research 1s required before it could be envisaged. And even were such a hypothesis to

be confirmed, it might be asked how far this would help us understand the nature of the IMR? And in particular, what would be the connection between determinations of this kind and those of a symbolic kind, which have so manifest a place in the

formation of the IMR? | - |. have already suggested the hypothesis that the ‘infantile’ | voyeurism of primitive cinema was an ‘acting out’ prefiguring 268 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

another voyeurism, the ‘repressed’ voyeurism of the institutional

spectator caught in the toils of shot-reverse-shot and the other

manifestations of ubiquity (see p.224 above). Could there be | other prefigurations of the same kind? For several years now, I—and not I alone—have felt interpellated by the dialectic established from around 1912 between the

close-up of the face or some other part of the body and shots

showing the body complete. |

Among the ‘infantile’ themes of the early cinema (see pp.6lf.

above), the frequency of the occurrence of that of the ‘fragmented body’ can, of course, socio-historically speaking, be attributed to the influence of popular spectacle. The villain of melodrama or Grand Guignol, like the circus conjurer, cut women in

half (see Fischer 1979). But the mechanical and optical tricks invented by the cinema almost from its birth gave extraordinary impetus to this theme which was manically pursued for the first ten years. And it is also undeniable that it disappeared as soon as a dissecting editing appeared. Think, for example, how rare it is even in the most manic slapstick films of the American golden

age: Keaton or Chaplin would have rejected as childish the violent acrobatics of the male and female wrestlers who change sex and tear off each others limbs in Nouvelles luttes extravagantes (Melies, 1900). And of course, they were childish: a kind

of acting out of the fantasies of infantile aggression Melanie Klein (1975, p.70) associated with the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’: ‘Fritz ... had phantasied about a woman in the circus who was sawn in pieces and then nevertheless comes to life again, and now he asked me whether this is possible. He then related ... that actually every child wants to have a bit of his mother, who is to

be cut into four pieces; he depicted quite exactly how she screamed and had paper stuffed in her mouth so she could not scream and what kind of faces she made, etc.’

How can one fail to compare this quotation with an anecdote from the beginnings of cinema (but whose source I can no longer

trace) according to which a woman who went to see a film shortly after the introduction of close-ups emerged completely traumatised by what she thought of as a horror film: ‘All those severed hands and heads!’

So what are we to make of the transition from a _ period CONCLUSION 269

characterised by the pro-filmic presentation of infantile amputations and dismemberings to what was eventually to be the institu-. tional balance between detail and full shot of the body via editing? Can it be seen as isomorphous with the stage in psychical development Klein locates at the age of four months: ‘With his growing integration, the child begins to perceive the mother as a whole person .... This change [is] the beginning of the depressive position .... The mother is now felt to be a whole object ... in contrast to the part objects of the previous state.... The shift from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position is a fundamental change from psychotic to sane functioning’ (Segal 1979, pp.78-9 & 132).

| Is it licit to think that the phenomenon remained anchored in the Institution ‘in a synchronous state’? Is the institutional ‘frag-

mentation of the body’, the kind of ‘respiratory’ oscillation between close shots and long shots an endless repetition of a ‘transition’ that Klein herself came to see as ‘endless’, beginning

over and over again, towards the mature integration of the human personality. Stephen Heath seems to be suggesting this in an important essay. Discussing an anecdote reported by Lillian Gish about the producers’ and technicians’ ‘neurotic’ resistance to

the loss of the body produced by the closeness of the camera demanded by Griffith and others, he writes (1976, pp.36-7):

Cinema can and does fragment the body (the hands over the piano in Letter from an Unknown Woman, the movement up over the body of Lina—Joan Fontaine, from feet to face, at the beginning of Suspicion) but the human figure, the total image of the body seen, is always the pay-off (as the examples indicate: the hands express the pianist; the movement up 1s the

appraising sweep of the male gaze, fixing the woman for the film). Within limits, those of narrative again, film plays on the passage between fragmented body and the image possession of the body whole, making identifications, remaking identity.

I believe that in order to be convinced that this is a neuralgic point of cinematic representation one need only think of the anxiety that grips us as institutional spectators—and there is an insti-

tutional spectator in all of us—at a film (whether primitive or 2/0 LIFE TO THOSE SHADOWS

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